Happy Easter!
I’m having a good weekend off, I actually have been working on some electronics at the shop. I finally got my developer board almost finished. I haven’t made boards at the shop yet since I had been there, but have designed a couple of boards that needed to be tried out.
One thing that I was working on was a developer board for myself. I like to breadboard circuits initially for experimentation or studying concepts or whatever, but if I wanted a 20MHz clock speed and RS232 provisions I would have to breadboard this in on every circuit. So what I decided to do instead was etch a board that would have all of that on it with a push in connector for the breadboard. I included the 20Mhz Crystal, a port for my RS232 Level Converter, and the ICSP or “In Circuit Serial Programming” header. The 1st board I made was rather incomplete on the ICSP side of things but otherwise worked. Then I decided to make a smaller more compact board because it was a bit crazy having the large item hanging off the side of the board:
So I revised my design and soon came up with something that had all the same functions (properly working) and was much smaller:
I initially filled in all the gaps with copper, then realized this was a huge mistake, but here is the size of the new board versus the old:
So I made a new one without the stuff filled in just the traces and promptly started to assemble it:
New design showing the revision:
Its not quite completely assembled yet, but when it is I’ll come up with a demonstration video? Sounds fun.
A buddy of mine wanted me to test these lights out for him he was going to use them camping. Drawing .03 amps these things put out quite a bit of light output for their size:
Various angles and shots with the lights on and off in my office:
More coming very soon..
