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
Altium board slots and OSH Park
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Category Archives: Tutorials
Testing laptop battery: pinout, SMBus, charge capacity
Introduction:
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
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A make-shift data acquisition system
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
Atmel QTouch tuning using Saleae Logic16
I happened to use an Atmel Qtouch chip in a project recently. The particular part was AT42QT1040, used in a fairly typical application- replacing four tactile buttons with four touch buttons. The chip is literally a “black box” that you give power, connect a few passives to the electrodes and in return you get four digital outputs representing the status of each key. No software to write, and is very simple. This particular feature came up very handy when a customer recently decided to switch from tactile to touch buttons mid-design. Since I was using Altium Designer on this project, the electrodes were essentially a freebie for me. I simply used Atmel Qtouch library, added the rectangular buttons into my schematic as components and Continue reading
TI Launchpad Booster Pack footprint library for DipTrace
Today’s post is a small DipTrace library i created for some TI Launchpad Booster Packs I am working on. It is modeled after a similar Eagle library posted on www.43oh.com forum.
There are two schematic symbols and three footprints:
Full size covers the whole Launchpad footprint
DipTrace layout and ordering boards from Dorkbot aka OSH Park
Well, my test design is complete and now I need a few prototypes to play with. The usual ways of ordering PCBs are rather expensive, with just tooling fees in hundreds of dollars. The remaining options are a few China based places such as Itead Studio, Seeed Studio ,PCB Pool and Batch PCB ran by Sparkfun, and an OSH Park ran by Laen from Dorkbot. He runs a community PCB service that groups orders and orders them periodically on a common panel, sharing costs between all people. The cost is very reasonable ($5 a square inch) and you get three boards. So a 2 square inches board in three copies will cost you $10 delivered from a US based board house! That definitely opens the door for quick prototyping of pretty much anything! After having used other company’s prototyping services, I must say OSH is also by far the most user friendly. Lets walk through the steps of ordering these boards. Continue reading