I've seen a few people talking about an "Advent" calendar of making.

I wonder if it's feasible to design a new PCB each day for a month…

My biggest concern is if I even have 31 PCB ideas… 😬😅

— Greg (@GregDavill) December 1, 2020

The talented Greg Davill took on the challenge of designing an average of 1 circuit board design and layout per day for 31 days in December.

Advent Calendar of Circuits 2020

1. gdpi SYZYGY pod featuring 2x digital video ports
2. resonance Addon board for card10 to add video output
3. meiji-led-ring Illuminator to fit around the front of a microscope
4. pcie_x4 SYZYGY pod creating a PCIe x4 add-in card
5. icebreaker++ icebreaker FPGA board, upgraded with an ECP5
6. pcie_x1 SYZYGY pod creating a compact PCIe x1 add-in card
7. arm-watch New ARM based controller for the Casio CA-53W watch
8. syzygy-sgmii Gigabit ethernet using an SGMII based PHY
9. hdmi-si HDMI breakout board
10. quad-7segment PMOD with a quad 7segment
11. syzygy-breakout Breakout board for a standard SYZYGY connector
12. icebreaker++-ram icebreaker FPGA board, upgraded with an ECP5 (+extra RAM)
13. sd-dummy Dummy SD card to connect to a host system via SDIO
14. gpdi-serdes GPDI using the serdes
15. rpi-hq-camera Connector for the Raspberry Pi HQ camera
16. syzygy-pmod SYZYGY to PMOD adapter
17. pmod-gnss GNSS PMOD, GPS + Glonass
18. led-panel Breakout for some White LEDs
19. syzygy-txr-breakout SYZYGY TXR4 to SMA connectors
20. syzygy-dual-atto320 SYZYGY to dual Atto320 LWIR sensors
21. syzygy-rgb888-lcd SYZYGY 5″ 800×480 LCD panel
22. memory-lcd-wing minimal wing for OrangeCrab
23. syzygy-flir-tau2 SYZYGY tau2 LWIR core
24. syzygy-flir-boson SYZYGY boson LWIR core
25. SCD30-3d-model 3d model for the SCD30 CO2 Sensor
26. esp32s2-co2-monitor ESP32s2 + Sharp memory LCD + CO2 Monitor
27. jtag-programmer FT232H based JTAG programmer
28. ECPBreaker ECP5 based icebreaker update, FX2 HS USB + SYZYGY
29. esp32s2-lepton Small ESP32 based thermal camera
30. esp32s2-breakout ESP32S2 + Sharp memory LCD
31. syzygy-epc901 SYZYGY breakout with an EPC901 CCD + 50MSps ADC

Day 28: ECPBreaker?
I'm still not sure about the name.

Another variant of the icebreaker, but with an ECP5, this time it uses an FX2 USB controller, and includes HyperRAM and a SYZYGY connector with adjustable VCCIO.https://t.co/oDLDTol9OL pic.twitter.com/I23INgpPXd

— Greg (@GregDavill) December 28, 2020

Day 5: icebreaker++, the icebreaker fpga design upgraded with an ECP5.https://t.co/KHi8CAm621 pic.twitter.com/7pB2vewsmk

— Greg (@GregDavill) December 5, 2020

Designing your own integrated circuits as a one-person operation from your home workshop sounds like science fiction. But 20 years ago, so did rolling your own circuit boards to host a 600 MHz microcontroller with firmware you wrote yourself. Turns out silicon design isn’t nearly as out of reach as it used to be and…

Remoticon Video: From Zero to ASIC; How to Design in Silicon — Hackaday

From Michael Bretti of Applied Ion Systems:

AIS-EPPT1 Pulsed Plasma Thruster

The AIS-EPPT1 Pulsed Plasma Thruster an experimental pulsed plasma thruster design aimed at low-cost, easy to manufacture, and simplified propulsion for Cubesats and PocketQubes. This system takes lessons learned from the original AIS-gPPT3-1C Integrated Propulsion Module and further expands its capabilities to attempt to increase fuel capacity, improve ignition, performance, and ultimately lower PPT cost and simplify manufacturing. The highly compact thruster is small enough for integration with PocketQubes, and can be implemented as a single thruster, cluster, or attitude control for Cubesats.

Applied Ion Systems Patreon is now officially LIVE! Are you a space enthusiast who would like to contribute directly to development of advanced EP from the only official open source electric propulsion program out there? Let's pioneer the field together! https://t.co/Nh9mqkSA4M

— Applied Ion Systems (@Applied_Ion) January 24, 2020

Today I dusted off a 16 channel DAC PCB I had designed on a whim back in March.https://t.co/RkIzFISjOd

Fiddled 'til I found settings to make the ADAU1966A spring to life. It's generating 16 distinct waveforms!

Updated @OSHPark share:https://t.co/BlWQTBITgN pic.twitter.com/4PrTJoU2AY

— Paul Stoffregen (@PaulStoffregen) December 27, 2020

Teensy creator Paul Stoffregen announced on Twitter:

Today I dusted off a 16 channel DAC PCB I had designed on a whim back in March. Fiddled ’til I found settings to make the ADAU1966A spring to life. It’s generating 16 distinct waveforms!

Here is the OSH Park shared project from Paul:

ADAU1966A Test

So far this PCB has only been tested with the code below. It does produce 16 different waveforms output with the correct frequencies and waveform shapes. The board seems to work, but no other testing has yet been done (or perhaps by the time you’re reading this, maybe this page is old info….)

Sharing this because it was requested on this Tweet. https://twitter.com/insolace/status/1342452185552932864

This board uses the ADAU1966A chip from Analog Devices. Analog Devices also made an older version of this chip, ADAU1966 without the “A”. It is listed as not recommended for new designs. If you search and find the old chip, don’t worry. Just make sure you’re searching for ADAU1966A with the “A”.

Kerry Scharfglass writes about this great project from Alex in Munich (@tinyledmatrix) on the Hackaday blog:

Discrete LEDs Make a Micro Display

Few things excite a Hackaday staff member more than a glowing LED, so it should be no surprise that combining them together into a matrix really gets us going. Make that matrix tiny, addressable, and chainable and you know it’ll be a hit at the virtual water cooler. We’ve seen [tinyledmatrix]’s work before but he’s back with the COPXIE, a pair of tiny addressable displays on one PCBA.

The sample boards seen at top are a particularly eye catching combination of OSH Park After Dark PCB and mysterious purple SMT LEDs that really explain the entire premise. Each PCBA holds two groups of discrete LEDs each arranged into a 5×7 display. There’s enough density here for a full Latin character set and simple icons and graphics, so there should be enough flexibility for all the NTP-synced desk clocks and train timetables a temporally obsessed hacker could want.

But a display is only as good as it’s SDK, right? The COPXIE is actually designed to be a drop in replacement for a different series of tiny LED matrices, the PIXIE by [Lixie Labs]. To complete the effect the COPXIE runs the same firmware and so has the same feature set. Each module (with two displays) can be controlled with just two pins (data and clock), and chains of more than 12 modules (24 displays) can be strung together. Plus there is a convenient Arduino friendly library which makes control a snap.

To build a COPXIE of your own, check out the schematic linked on the Hackaday.io page, and the layout at the OSH Park share link. Note that it seems like [tinyledmatrix] may not have completely validated these boards, but given there are plenty of photos of them working they seem like a safe bet.

I quite like this combination I soldered today: @oshpark 's After Dark PCB with purple LEDs. This is my COPXIE project, which is inspired by PIXIE from @lixielabs . More information can/will be also found here: https://t.co/BLMhnu95Vu pic.twitter.com/Ssg1d1uNFN

— Alex – @[email protected] (@tinyledmatrix) October 22, 2020

Great DIY automotive project from Evan Li:

BUILDING A QUAD GAUGE FOR A PORSCHE 914

I’ve recently become the co-owner of a 1972 Porsche 914 with a 5.7L LS1 swap. As a result of the shift from air cooled to water cooled, the car required the addition of a gauge for coolant temperature. An oil pressure gauge was also added and the two gauges sat together, mounted on the floor near the shifter. It didn’t look great

Chad Etzel recently posted a great video of a DIY build:

…took 1.5 days from idea popping into my head ’til… you’ll see…

Project build video of our new family Christmas tree!
🎄🎄🎄

…took 1.5 days from idea popping into my head 'til… you'll see…

(should i start a youtube channel y/n 😂) pic.twitter.com/cD3Kfpk2HT

— Chad Etzel (@jazzychad) December 23, 2020