Posted on 8th Feb 2021
OSHpark got me boards before UPS got me parts. Both came together yesterday, so I built up 6 PCBs, sending some off to Tod and Olzeke beta testers. Grabbed a 4x20 New Haven display that was sitting here in a bin, and mated the 2 together. It passed the smoke test, and with a 1 line program, I could see the default display come up.(alternate lines on and off) IO(3)=1 ' turn on Backlight transistor drive
Posted on 26th Jan 2021
Tod's been working on a super-duper breadboard system. No doubt it has every bell and whistle imaginable piled on top of a kitchen sink. One feature is a line based LCD. Now these are real cheap these days, but they usually use a PCF8574 I2C I/O expander. Not that I2C is bad, but to write a byte into the LCD takes at least 8 I2C operations, not to mention that for whatever reason I2C takes lots of interrupts and states in the software. Serial UARTs and SPI both potentially faster and the hardware on the micro is such, you write a byte and go away.
Posted on 8th Jan 2021
Many DIY's shy away from surface mount resistors and capacitors in boards they design. But I think once you do a couple of times, it is actually quicker to use 1206 components than bending leads for through hole parts and flipping the board over and soldering, then trimming the leads. So here I a...
Posted on 7th Jan 2021
Olzeke took the lockdown and holidays to complete a KiCAD project. He built a breakout board for the LPC54005 and LCD display.
Posted on 1st Jan 2021
Happy New Year. Kicked off the year with a new PCB design. This design is aimed at the ARMstamp and LPC1768mBed boards, as well as Arduino and PMod peripheral boards. Power input with 5V regulator, RJ45 Ethernet and USB for the mBed. Terminal strips on the other end and a large prototyping area,
Posted on 24th Dec 2020
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from Coridium. Quiet here with Nanny Newsome shutting down the state. One of our Linux users reported an error in the Show Project menu, which also would affect the search of the whole project. Some tweaks to the BASICtools Tcl code and that has been fixed. The links here and below have been updated.