South West Makers

The other day I wanted to do a quick breadboard circuit test and I needed to get 5V and 3.3V onto the circuit. I have a nice RPi based Hat that could be used to inject power to the breadboard, but it's a monster and I thought all I need is a simple small PCB. So I spent a few hours to make my own on...

Over time, my boards have become more dense, as I learn more and try to make things smaller. I started with SOT-23 sized generic MOSFETs and over time have purchased smaller and smaller MOSFETs, with last year getting down to DFN1006 (1mm x 0.6mm) sized components. I place them on the solder pasted ...

I was always a bit mystified about PDM MEMS microphones. I had a chance to use one that talks over the i2S bus when I helped design up the version 0.4 of the Open Source Smart Glasses PCB URL: https://github.com/TeamOpenSmartGlasses/OpenSourceSmartGlasses/tree/main/electronics_and_firmware/OSSG_v0p4...

This is a tiny breakout board for the MT6701 360 degree magnetic rotation field sensor IC. It has a small JST-SH connector for the power and i2C pins. This seems to work really well, and will be used in an up coming project. Unfortunately, it seems the tap function (senses a sudden increase if magne...

It didn't take long to whip this PCB up. Just a breakout for the cheapish QMC5883 digital compass IC. I was very happy with the consistent compass heading readings I got from it, so I am now putting the IC into some of my other projects: QMC5883L_sml.jpg I can use either a 1mm pin JST-SH SMD connect...

I am really happy with this version of the PCB. This was (at the time), the first JLCPCB US$2 for 5 PCBs special on 6 layer PCB, with ENIG (gold) finish and via's filled with epoxy and plated, so it has a very smooth finish. I love it - well done JLCPCB! SE_v0.8-front_sml.jpg And here it is with all...

Well this version of thew board turned out to be quite usable. There are still two errors with the design: 1. kind of small, but I have two voltage dividers, one to measure the input voltage and the other to measure the output voltage. They are switched, so as not to load down the USB line, or at le...

This version of the RGB (WS2812) LED Controller even smaller, just 35mm x 26mm. It has the same ambient light simple photo transistor sensor as the 2-Port board, but the RGB power output is switched via a MOSFET. This means I can isolate the boards power from the RGB light strip and run the strip vi...

Version 0.6 PCB arrived and was assembled and tested well. While it's meant to work with the corresponding dual Li-ion 18650 battery power supply PCB, during testing it was painfully discovered that one should not plug power in around the wrong way and therefore magic smoke was released. This helped...

The V0.5 (I seem to like starting my board versions off at 0.5 for the initial design), arrived some time ago and it didn't take long to make up. Most of the features worked, however most of it relied on having a Raspberry Pi of some kind attached. This was during the difficult times (2022) of Raspb...

I spent a lot of time playing around with this board. Writing code to test out functionality (it works well), and then to see how low it could measure currents. Ideally I was hoping to get down into the 10's of uA, however I discovered a few design flaws: 1) the 10uA test load is done by placing a 5...

Version 0.8 PCB is my first 6 layer PCB - done as a trial, as JLCPCB have a special offer of A$2.65 for five PCBs in either 6 or 8 layers and includes a ENIC (gold) pad finish. It was only after I submitted the board, that I found out they where charging A$42 if you wanted it done in any other colou...

So much has happened on this project. The green V0.5 PCB worked well, but the MPU-6050 was out of stock and if found, the price was way too much, so I designed a V0.6 PCB where I swapped it out for a LSM6DSL IMU. At the time, it was around a quarter of the price. This was manufactured on a Blue PCB ...

This circuit uses the XC61CC3002MR which is a 3.0 volt voltage supervisor IC. This IC will output a HIGH 3.3V on the output if the IN voltage is 3.0V or above. When the IN voltage drops below 3.0V, it will output a LOW voltage. I am using this to keep Q5 MOSFET switched on, which in turn pulls Q6 ga...

A while back I did a ESP32 based simple RGB LED controller , but there was no onboard UART, so it had to be programmed via an external USB to UART cable. Now that the ESP32-C3 MCU is available and has been ported into Arduino, I thought it was time to spin out a version based on the C3. The C3-Mini ...

Version 0.7 of both PCB's have been assembled and tested. With only a few small changes in the design - just to make it to work better: OPJ_Driver-Board_V0.7.jpg Of course, as per usual, once I have a break with a project and start working and thinking about it again, I usually come up with possible...

The blank PCB arrived back and after laser cutting a plastic stencil, I placed and hot plated the components into place. I am really happy with it so far. I certainly looks colorful when all of the 19 RGB LEDs are lit up. Here, I only have them set at 25% brightness: USB-Profiler-PCB_V0.6.jpg I am n...

Greg and I have been playing around with ePapers projects and every now and then I get caught out with an issue and have no quick way to see whats happening with the various voltages and signals used to drive an ePaper. We what chatting away about this, we thought that it would be handy to just "see...

Some time back, Hack-a-Day had a posting on PCB track width and current carrying capability. This set me wondering if I might be able to do something similar, So I quickly put together this PCB: JLCPCB_Demo1.jpg The design kind of grew of the few hours it took to lay it all out. I noticed that there...

And there I was thinking that the Acrylic Sign project was all done and dusted, but no, it turns out I had a MOSFET in backwards, with the body diode allowing USB 5V through to the Li-ion battery, whoops. It wasn't all that bad, as by the time it had gone through a few USB cables and a diode, it was...