That's my heart, people.

Summer clean up.

Good news, my first board ever, Chipcon CC1111 based USB radio, works fine. I bought an official TI's eZ430-Chronos with 915MHz transmitter, loaded transmitter firmware onto my board (it was designed maximally compatible with TI's for this purpose), and bingo - it works.

It is not only my very first board designed, it's also the most complex one. It has many 0402 components - radio reference designs frequently use this totally hobbyist unfriendly size. And having no network analyzer around the only hope is to follow someone else's design as close as possible.

But it works. I did not check the range compared to the official one, but I would not be surprised if it's not spectacular.

Check out my board compared to the official TI's. Mine is larger, breadboard friendly board.

Conway Life - redesign of Ladyada's board

I described this project first on the http://dangerousprototypes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=2219 (DP forum text follows with some edits):

I designed small 2-layer PCB for a version of Ladyada Game of Life. The board is two-side, front has 16 0603 LEDs on it, back has ATTiny861, 4 resistors, 4 FETs, 2 capacitors and one button.

The board was prototyped through Laen's PCB group order.

One side with TQFP processor was soldered on a hot plate, 16 LEDs on the other side soldered manually.

The board's firmware is not ready yet - the processor is quite different from the original ATMega 168 - less pins, less memory, fewer timers etc.

The LED activation is implemented as 4 x 4 matrix with columns connected through FETs and rows connected through limiting resistor directly to ATTiny. The idea is to activate one column at a time - thus FETs, and light up to 4 rows for every column - so we can get away with direct connection of row to processor pin.

The board is alive - first test lights the LEDs and senses the button.

Next step is a full port of original firmware with communication protocol - the boards can be connected to form large Game of Life field.

I'd appreciate suggestions on cheap 4-wire side connector.


--- end of quote ---

Here is further details on the project that seems to be interesting for me. Recently I learned through Laen's tweet about nice ISP connector for AVR boards: http://daniel-spilker.com/blog/2011/04/25/isptouch-for-avr-microcontrollers/ . I faced with analogous problem - the main curse of miniaturization is connectors. I have four communication connectors for proprietary (if you can say so about open) protocol, and ISP connector to program the beast. If you look at the photo

you'll see that the left side looks more populated with these nice golden strips. Upper three of them is an upper part of shortened board-side ISP connector I use on some of my boards. The layout is a standard AVR ISP 6-pin put on a board's side. I use a small adapter board with similar connector and solder bent pins to it, not unlike a SDcard breakout with headers. This is the header:

This is how it is connected to the board:

The board is still to be programmed, I port Ladyada's software slowly.

First post

Hi, I am a professional programmer who recently became fascinated with electronics, especially micro-controllers. That's why the blog's name - I do not have favorite, I try any chip I can get for a reasonable price.

So far I tried:

1. TI MSP430 - Launchpad, moved to breadboard, moved to soldered breadboard. Controls a LED chain, emulates Apple LED breathing effect. Done without tables, by calculating exponents without multiplication and division. I have soldered myself a GoodFET.
2. Chipcon - so far not that successful attempt to make a radio USB dongle (not unlike IM-ME, but using single chip - cc1111 instead of unhealthy mix of Cypress USB and cc1110). Radio without network analyzer is a hard problem. 
3. Atmel AVR - I have made many boards, from Teensy 1.0 semi-clone, vusbpico - miniature clone of USBTinyISP, SMT version of Lady Ada's (Conway's) Life, attenuation controller for pre-amp (inspired by http://www.vaneijndhoven.net/jos/switchr/design.html) etc. I do have Arduino clone, that is how I bootstrapped the process. In the beginning you need pre-programmed programmer to program your own programmer (vusbpico ;-). I bought Anarduino and mainly use it as a programmer for other Atmels.
4. ST32 - I have Discovery board - it works, but I did not try to program it.
5. UBW32 - PIC32, nee MIPS-based board - same thing.
6. SMT clone of Altera CPLD board - Kemani from G. Eric Rogers (see Amani64 site).
7. Parallax Propeller - breadboarded a simple blinking LEDs, was amazed by easiness and clarity of multicore code. Apparently, I still did not face my first race condition :-)

I use excellent Laen's PCB group order service - couldn't recommend it more. I encourage you to try it instead of making PCB at home (unless you love it, definitely). I couldn't imagine myself making all this stuff without this service. The turnaround time - 2 weeks in average, starting closest Monday - partially explains this multitude of semi-finished boards. I am trying to pipeline the process - while one board is coming, I program another and develop the third.

Given this affordable service, I prefer to design boards myself, rather than order ready made breakouts or soldered boards. Even if you modified slightly someone else's design, you learned something new.

I plan to publish all my projects in different stages of completion here, and will be glad if you find it useful or entertaining.

I also want to share my experience of a (almost) total novice in this foreign and wonderful world. I still remember how obvious things (what 0603 means - is it imperial or metric?) can be puzzling and frustrating.

So, wish me good luck!