By popular demand, the breakout/passthrough combination boards family now includes a 1mm pitch variant:
This version handles up to 30 signals which seems to be a practical limit of most 1mm FPC connectors. Each signal is numbered and brought to a 0.1 in spacing header for easy connection to your favorite logger/analyzer/scope. Continue reading
Front side
Here is a product whose origin lies in the pain and suffering of an actual development project. Imagine you have a shiny new display made somewhere out there in a world that comes with a demo board and some datasheets. So you take a display, hook it up to your favorite development board and try to follow the documentation. Except nothing works. And yet a a demo next to you works well, but is very tiny, has no test points and not documented. So you poke at the fine pitch flex connector with a scope for a bit, and realize you need a better way to capture what’s going on. Off you go to the lab and cobble together what is essentially a pass-through: two FPC breakout boards back to back, with a 0.1″ header in between.
Now you can hook up your trusty Saleae Logic analyzer and look at what the demo board is actually sending down as opposed to what the datasheet says it should. This board is exactly that, but made into one neat package. It can handle standard 0.5mm pitch FPC connectors up to 40 pins wide.
A while back I did a teardown on a vintage multimeter- Weston 6000. The 38 years old LCD was dead, but otherwise I saw signs of life in the meter. So I figured I’d try recreating the display using modern components. Continue reading
I’ve been working recently on a new top secret project that used multiple slots in the board. Normally I just define them as slotted pads in Altium and the board house deals with it. Continue reading
Available on Tindie is a new kit by Kuzyatech- an LM3916 based VU meter/bargraph driver.
Front view- all parts except the display are on the back. Red version shown
The new version of LM317 voltage regulator kit (Rev B1) is finally here. This version implements a few useful enhancement over the A1 release making it a much more versatile board. The kit is available on Tindie– the marketplace for makers. Continue reading
As a result of visiting Hamfest, I ended up with a laptop to take apart – a fairly new Toshiba Satellite C675D with a broken screen. It’s not a Hamfest if you don’t bring home something to take apart of course! Today we’ll be testing the battery it came with to see if it’s salvageable.The date code says it was made in 11/2011
Patient all hooked up
Recently, I was in urgent need for a data logger with a relatively fast sampling rate of at least 10Khz. As usually the need appeared late on Friday and system had to be functional over the weekend so ordering something was not an option. Continue reading
Now that the boards have arrived, I thought I’d post a few pictures of the batch being made and tested:
Ready for solder paste
Here is something I got tired of making every time so I designed a board for it! It’s a simple LM317 power supply breakout: Continue reading