The nRF9160 Feather by Jared Wolff (aka Circuit Dojo LLC) is an electronics development board. It features tghe nRF9160 by Nordic Semiconductor. This part is capable of both CAT M1 LTE and NB-IoT for communication with the outside world. It’s compatible with the Zephyr RTOS which is fully baked into Nordic’s nRF Connect SDK. Other toolchains and languages coming soon to a Github repository near you.
Low-power shutdown, built-in 4FF SIM card slot, flexible power supply, and more.
I was a complete failure. My prototype wasn’t working. I spent at least an hour trying to rework a frustratingly large LTE module on an impossibly small circuit board.
It wasn’t going to work.
So I went back to the drawing board. I poured my years of hardware experience into a tiny form factor.
The end product?
Something smart. Something with LTE, NB-IoT, and GPS. Something anyone could get started with right away.
We are excited about the OrangeCrab FPGA dev board by Greg Davill as it packs the power of an ECP5 FPGA, which has an open source design flow, and 128MB DDR3 RAM into the Adafruit Feather form-factor:
We were happy to fabricate the boards for test fixture and it is great to see Greg showing it is action:
The answer is yes.
This 3d printed piece now applies force only along the PCB edges, avoiding applying un-wanted force to the BGA parts. pic.twitter.com/3la0uyzale
This project uses an Adafruit Feather M0 Basic Proto board to control a group of Color Kinetics or other RGB light fixtures using the DMX-512 protocol. We’ll build a DMX-512 interface FeatherWing then connect it to the Feather M0 using a Particle Ethernet FeatherWing. Once the hardware is built and assembled, we’ll write software with a web-based GUI to generate RGB lighting effects and control the attached RGB lights using the DMX protocol. By modifying the software on the Feather M0, different effects can be generated and added to the web-based GUI.
Required Materials
The materials required for this project are:
DMX FeatherWing board and parts. We’ll discuss ordering the board, the required parts, and the assembly in the next section.
Particle Ethernet FeatherWing PoE Adapter (optional). Note: The PoE adapter has been discontinued. If you want to make your own version, the Eagle design files are available here but the header sockets on the module need to be moved to align with the headers on the Ethernet FeatherWing board.
The DMX FeatherWing
The photo above shows the assembled DMX FeatherWing. The next few sections are dedicated to describing and building the DMX FeatherWing hardware.
Circuit Design and Schematic
To make sure everything conformed to the FeatherWing form factor, I started with the Eagle design for the Adafruit Power Relay FeatherWing. I deleted everything from the schematic and board except for the FeatherWing symbol and dimension lines. The FeatherWing symbol includes the board outline layer and the holes for the 0.1″ pitch, 0.025″ square post headers that connect the FeatherWing to other boards. I saved this as a new file then started my design.
Chipsat development board for low-power, embedded computing in space
Junebug is a cutting-edge addition to the Feather ecosystem. It acts as a development board for chipsats – an emerging class of space system. It offers unique support for batteryless, intermittent computing. The FPU, DSP instructions, and storage space allow advanced sensor data processing with ML. Junebug is easy to manufacture, with parts selected to allow hand-assembly.
The schematic, PCB design, Gerber and Drill files, bill of materials, and other files are provided in the linked GitHub repository.
It’s hard to beat the fidelity and durability of printed text on paper. But the e-paper display gets pretty close, and if you couple it will great design and dependable features, you might just prefer an e-reader over a bookshelf full of paperbacks. What if the deal is sweetened by making it Open Hardware? The Open Book Project rises to that challenge and has just been named the winner of the Take Flight with Feather contest.
This e-reader will now find its way into the wild, with a small manufacturing run to be put into stock by Digi-Key who sponsored this contest. Let’s take a closer look at the Open Book, as well as the five other top entries.
You may remember seeing the Open Book back in October when Tom Nardi looked in on early testing for the board. It was prototyped using the Adafruit Feather, which of course was the main requirement of the contest. The controller is now built into the board for standalone functionality with the Feather header providing an opportunity for expansion.
The screen is 4.2″ with a resolution of 300×400. It reads files from a microSD card and uses seven buttons on the front of the board for user input. A dedicated flash chip stores language files with the character sets of your choice. The small LiPo cell can be charged via the USB port, and of course e-paper helps greatly in reducing the power consumption of the reader.
You’ll find a few extras on the back. There’s a headphone jack for listening to audio books, and get this, a built-in microphone and a TensorFlow-trained model allow for voice control! There are STEMMA headers to add your own hardware options, and designs for laser-cut and 3D-printed enclosures.
This is a SAMR34 based LoRa dev-board with all the necessary components for fast prototyping. It’s a successor of my previous Penguino RF module and Feather breakout design ( https://www.tindie.com/products/16985/ )The new design uses the RAK4260 module from @RAKWireless and improves on some aspects, such as USB Type-C, RGB LED, user button, battery protection & voltage supervision, and optional flash & per-provisioned secure element IC pads.
Background:
About a year ago, after I first saw SAMR34 System in Package (SiP) in 2018 Electronica I couldn’t find a module for it and I took up the challenge for myself to build one myself. Then sharing first renders with the Twitterverse it gathered quite a bit of interest and I started selling couple over at my Tindie store. At the time I named the project TinyLoRa but for legal reasons I had to change it to Penguino.
Specs:
ATSAMR34J18 LoRA System-in-Package (SiP) based RAK4260
ARM Cortex M0+ MCU & SX1276 LoRa Radio
256KB Flash, 40 KB RAM
Max Tx Power: +20 dBm; Max Sensitivity: -148dBm; Rx Current: 17mA (typical)
Frequency Range: 862 to 1020 MHz (DS values)
Deep Sleep Current: ~1 μA (module only)
Li-Po battery charging IC
RGB user LED, Battery Charge Status (red) and Power (blue) (w/ cut-off jumpers)
3.3V low Iq LDO (~1 μA)
Low-voltage battery cut-off supervisor IC (3V Vbat cutoff)
USB Type-C connector with protection/filtering circuit
0.75 A resettable fuse
Voltage divider for Vbat monitoring (w/ cut-off jumpers)
The Open Book is an open-hardware device for reading books in all the languages of the world. It includes a large screen and buttons for navigation, as well as audio options for accessibility and ports to extend its functionality. Its detailed silkscreen, with the all the manic energy and quixotic ambition of a Dr. Bronner’s bottle, aims to demystify the Open Book’s own design, breaking down for the curious reader both how the book works, and how they can build one for themselves.
At the core of the Open Book is a SAMD51J19A microcontroller, a powerful ARM Cortex M4 with 512 KB of Flash and 192 KB of RAM. It has 51 pins of GPIO, and the Open Book uses all of them for peripherals and possibilities:
A 400×300 black and white e-paper screen enables the core experience of, y’know, reading.
A MicroSD slot allows for plenty of external storage for files. An offline copy of Wikipedia fits in 64 gigs — Hitchhiker’s Guide, anyone?
User input comes from seven buttons on a shift register, plus an eighth button tied directly to one of the SAMD51’s interrupt pins.
A dedicated flash chip for languages gives the book room to store glyphs and Unicode data for every language in the Basic Multilingual Plane (which is most of the languages in use today).
OSH Park 