I’m thinking of putting together a medium-run service for geeks that have gone through the prototyping stages and now want to make a small to medium number (a few dozen to a couple hundred) of their boards.
If you think this would interest you, please let me know as soon as possible. I’d like to do the beta-run by April 4th, but that’s dependent on there being enough interest.
UPDATE: I’m doing another beta run on May 9th!
A few months ago I was having lunch with some friends, and one of them pulled out an ARM Cortex M0 development board from Nuvoton. It was cool in that it was a really low cost ARM development platform, but for me, it was also cool because it was a color I hadn’t seen on a PCB before.
I immediately mailed our fab and asked if they’d be willing to do it. After some back and forth, they agreed, and (after some trial and error) I give to you our latest feature.
PURPLE BOARDS!
That’s right. Purple.
It’s taken me five orders to get the color mix right, and thanks to everyone that’s unwittingly participated in the color mix experimentation.
From now on, this will be the standard color (though I still reserve the right to switch colors randomly, so let me know when you order if your boards NEED to be a certain color).
The PCB Order is now a year old! It was looking pretty sketchy for a while there, but we’re now filling panels on a regular basis. Thanks, everyone!
Before I get to the projects, I’d first like to put out a call for help: I’ve been working on putting together an automated ordering system, and though I’m a competent programmer, I haven’t had much experience with doing webapps, and in particular Ruby on Rails.
I’m looking for a mentor. I just want someone I can ask questions of to make sure I’m doing things right. I have a lot of it figured out, but I keep running into basic concepts that I don’t immediately get, and it slows me down.
If you can help, please mail me.
Now: The projects!!
tekparasite has made this awesome Daft Punk helmet. He’d been doing it all in perfboard, but decided that was too painful to keep doing, and wanted the ease and reliability of actual PCBs.
The fun thing for me was that I was listening to Daft Punk (the new Tron: Legacy soundtrack) while depaneling them. Rockin’.
Greeeg has been throwing a lot of cool projects into the order lately.
I really dig the color of the LEDs too. So cool.
“Attiny45 + ADXL345 + 2Mb Dataflash + skinny pcb = Arrowdatalogger” It fits in the body of the arrow and records flight data from an ADXL345 accelerometer.
Dan Strother (a DorkbotPDX regular) has been doing all sorts of awesome projects.
Boards include:
- FMC-LPC to SATA adapter
- NES cartridge adapter
- MT9V032 LVDS camera board
- SATA breakout board
Auto Sport Labs has a tweeting Mazda Miata, which will be their entry in this weekend’s Chump Car race in Portland, Oregon.
What it tweets:
You can even send it tweets to play with its lighting.
Some people got really creative with the silkscreen on this last panel.
The board house actually got confused by this and sent me a “Did you mean to do this?” message:
(Board Designed by Mikal Hart)
I love the board-as-machine imagery of this one:
(Board designed by Levi Luckenbaugh)
A couple of people pitched in to cover the $50 it costs to get the panel done in gold finish. Normally it’s plain lead-free HASL. I really love how it shines in these photos.
The board featured here is from AutoSport Labs, recently featured in this news article: Go fast on a budget. AutoSport Labs’s order really made the 4 layer order possible. Thanks ASL!
This is called the “Double DIPper” from Tubular Controls in Australia. It puts two Parallax Propeller chips into a single DIP formfactor. Getting a lot of Propeller boards in the order lately!
This is just cool:
I’ve gotten enough requests that I think there’s enough interest to do a four layer PCB order.
The specs would be similar to the two layer order:
The order date would be September 6th.
If you’re interested or have any comments or questions, please email me.
Update: The four layer order was a success! In fact, it filled up early. Next four layer order: October 4th, but submit your boards early to make sure they get in.
One of the coolest things about running the PCB Order is seeing all the awesome projects that come through it.
For example:
“The Video Game Shield is an Arduino add-on shield to make your own video games, including graphics, text, sound effects, and music! Based on the great arduino-tvout project, this Shield includes everything you need to make awesome black-and-white video games on your TV. It supports up to two Nintendo Wii Nunchuck controllers for an easy and familiar interface.”
How cool! The attention to detail is really excellent. The Wiichucks even click onto the board, rather than hanging loosely like with some Wiichuck adapters. I really like that it has prototyping space in the middle for expansion, too.
“The Parallax Multimedia Board (PMB) is a Audio/Video development platform based on the Parallax Propeller microcontroller. You can use it as a MIDI-Synthesizer as an example and do some live audio visualization on the VGA output. You could use the SIDCog – a self-contained software emulation of the famous Commodore SID (Sound Interface Device – also known as MOS6581) in one or more of the cores. So you could possibly emulate 18 SID channels simultanously.”
As a big fan of chiptunes, this really strikes my fancy. You could do a complete SID orchestra with this thing. He even has an add-on for interfacing with MIDI. Awesome.
Andrew Magill made this most excellent 8×8 RGB Matrix display. See if you can guess what video is playing on it before reading the comments on the flickr page to find out.
See also, his assembling the Chroma at 50x speed video.
Designed by SiliconFarmer, this little guy pairs a 4V 50µA solar panel with a .33F supercapacitor. It takes a full day in the Sun to charge up to full capacity (a little less than 1.5 milliwatt hours total). That may not seem like much, but it’s enough to run an atmega168V for 22 minutes, or one of Atmel’s lower powered microcontrollers for over an hour and a half. Put in some sleep code, and you can go for days.
Parts list:
Eagle Files: SolarThief.zip
