This is the third part of the meta-tutorial, where I talk about designing a cheap plant watering sensor. If you did not already read the first and second part, please do it now. These parts contain a lot information which lead to this point of the tutorial. The second part ended with step 14, designing a first prototype PCB.
via How to Design a Cheap Plant Watering Sensor (Part 3) — Lucky Resistor
We’re excited to announce that Chicago will play host to the Hackaday Unconference on March 18th. We are happy to expand our unconference plans to include this event at Pumping Station One from 1-8pm on 3/18. Astute readers will notice that this is the second location we have announced this week.
News from the USB DAC + Headphone Amp project by Yin Zhong (summivox):
In the interim update post I posted the plan for integration into 2 boards: A 2-layer power board, and a 4-layer main board. Actually I have had a good copy of the main board for quite a while: Story for the power board is not as good though. In the beginning I screwed up on […]
writes on the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) blog:
We are very pleased to announce that our new community forums are up and running. The discussion forums are powered by Discourse, which is easy to use, easy to maintain, and open source.
Among other new features, Discourse offers the ability to follow and reply to topics via email. This was one of the biggest reasons we decided to migrate our forums from their old home on bbPress. We’re hoping this will breathe some life into what has otherwise been an admittedly dormant part of the site.
Lucky Resistor designed this programming adapter for ATtiny13 and similar chips:
As mentioned in my article about designing a cheap plant watering sensor, I built a small adapter which can be used to pre-program the ATtiny13A. This is necessary, because once soldered on the board, I only have a debugWire interface, which has to be enabled first.
The adapter has a small 50mil JTAG header, where the Atmel ICE can be connected with the board. There is also room for a USB mini jack, which is used to power the MCU while programming. A small on-off switch is used to power the MCU and a LED is placed as indicator to see if the MCU has power.
One of the DIL/ZIF adapters is mounted on top of the female headers. Most of the adapters for SO-8, SO-14 and SO-16 will work with this board.
To make the board more versatile, I added a number of jumpers and solder points. By default, the adapter is connecting to the right pins for the ATtiny13A, but you can cut these routes and solder wires onto the board to implement any kind of connection you like.
The design files are available on GitHub:
LuckyResistor/ATtinyAdapterLuckyResistor has shared the board on OSH Park:
We like the novel orientation of pogo pins that Wing Tang Wong used in this board design:
Upcycles D1 Mini Wemos board to create a USB connected ESP8266 Pogo pin jig
This is a board designed to take a WeMos D1 Mini board(with the ESP module removed) and use it as a USB interface with built-in reset/flash functionality for bare ESP8266 modules similar to the ESP-12 units.
The design files are available on GitHub:
ESP8266 Programming D1 Mini Pogo Jig V1
Electronic Cats made an important commit at SamyKam schematics. The first version of the PCB had an issue with a ground for the rotary encoder. The switch to select things in the menu was not working properly. After the fix, I tested the last version of the SamyKam PCB today from Oshpark, and […]
Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) had a track yesterday on Embedded Linux and video of the talks are on YouTube:
The video is a recording of the entire day of Room 104 so refer to the Friday schedule for information on the individual talks:
Jim Kleiner created a minimal FPGA cape for the BeagleBone Black: BBB LX9 FPGA Board Jim describes his design decisions: I decided to try a minimalist hand solderable FPGA board. The LX9 is the largest part available in a TQG-144, beyond that its BGAs One of the key points is that the SPI interface is on BBB […]
via FPGA cape for BeagleBone Black — BeagleBoard.org Blog
KiCad design files are available on GitHub:
KD2BOA has shared the board on OSH Park:
An update from the USB DAC + Headphone Amp project by Yin Zhong (summivox):
Months into the project and I was still amazed at the lack of availability of a class of ASICs: USB-I2S bridges. Well I just lied — if you are fine with USB 1.1 and USB Audio Class (UAC) 1.0, which severely limits your (bit depth × resolution × channel count)
So I kept looking for ASICs, and I found one that is close enough: XMOS XHRA-2HPA. It even comes with a reference design that does exactly what I want!
summivox has shared the board on OSH Park:
OSH Park 