South West Makers

If your designing up a power supply and various electronic devices, it's handy to be able to test them out by placing a load of some kind on the output. While back in 2015 I designed up a special battery monitor and load and it worked well, I had to program the settings in each time. While in Shenzh...

A friend in Shenzhen needed a simple logic analyser and asked for my advice, I mentioned the common cheap one that I picked up some years ago. Due to the age of it, it came with a USB Mini connector, so I mentioned that it would be good to search for something that has a USB-C connector. He found th...

While in China last year (2024), I needed a bench power supply that could output more than 18A and operate up to 48V, plus I wanted to be able to record current flow. I looked at a few different models on line, but it was difficult to find the specs on the recording frequency, eg: how often would it...

So I have previously designed up a ESP32-C3 based SAO Controller board . This is nice and works well, BUT the MCU costs ￥23.7934 (around A$5.40) which is getting a bit pricey. I had volunteered to design up a Simple Add On (SAO) board for the 2024 KiCad Asia conference and run an assembly workshop a...

Not to be outdone by the RP2040 SAO Controller , I thought I would have a go at designing a SAO Controller based around the very cheap CH32V003 RISK-V based MCU. This is only ￥1.791 or about A$0.39 each. Plus I don't need a crystal or flash memory IC that the RP2040 does. Sure this is no where as po...

Last year I spent six months playing around with designing motor boards. I needed a 24V to 6.4V buck converter that could output at least 5-7 Amps. As my motor boards cost around A$250/ea, I thought it might be prudent to quickly design up a breakout PCB so I could test the efficiency of the DC-DC c...

Cedric a good friend who I met in Shenzhen years ago, recently put me onto the new range of STM32 MCUs. These are meant to eventually replace their STM8 8-bit MCU range. One of them is only 1.4mmx1.4mm in size. However to get access to the center BGA pins, you need currently to pay a steep manufactu...

I seem to be on the road quite a bit these days. I have a trusty 10 year old light (weight) Toshiba laptop (original Li-ion battery) that is still going strong. It's amazing that a lot of their laptop use a 2.1mm barrel jack connector for power input. None of this fancy proprietary connector rubbish...

Recently I was doing some work from a hotel room for a few days. I was trying to figure out how to get Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) working on a very cheap CH32V003 microprocessor. I didn't have any LEDs with me, so it was difficult to see what was going on. I ended up trying to use a multimeter to ...

Hawk volunteered to design up the the conference badge and is based around the Nations Tech: N32L406 MCU, something like this: https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/Microcontroller-Units-MCUs-MPUs-SOCs_Nations-Technologies-Inc-N32L406CBL7_C2981444.html This is a low power MCU and in fact the board ran...

I have now designed three SAO hat boards, so initially I designed my SAO Tester PCB with three SAO connectors. In the initial version of the Tester I had one socket configured with a MOSFET switchable power. I think that was so i could test the power side of things, but I never ended up using that f...

Since I was on a SAO Hat making mode, I thought I would have a go at making one for the Shenzhen based TroubleMaker makerspace and a koala for myself: TM_front-working.jpg koala-front.jpg I wanted the front side to be a clean as possible, so I used 0805 0 ohm resistors on the back side as track jump...

In June 2023 I was chatting with a friend about my idea to lead a tour of the electronics scene in Shenzhen China and he suggested that we make and assemble a PCB as part of the tour. Since a bunch of us where attending the tour I thought it would be fun to hold a KiCad conference as well. We decide...

I have been traveling a lot and luggage space is sometimes at a premium. A few years ago I purchased a smallish 240V temperature controlled soldering iron and that has been my handy travel companion. But I know I can go smaller. I recently purchased the Pinecil v2 USB-C based soldering iron and oh y...

I submitted the design to JLCPCB while I was recently in Shenzhen, China and a few days later I received the blank PCB. Luckily I was I had purchased a new hot plate for the November Asian KiCad Conference, so I could quickly assemble the board. While it pulsed, it didn't keep the Power Bank alive. ...

Visited the Penang Science Cluster Makerspace recently and was fortunate to be able to spend three weeks working there on a few projects, one being my USB Power Profiler PCB but mostly working on the software side. Had lots of fun with the latest v0.8 version of the board: 2023-09-10_09-34-50_sml.1....

It can be infuriating when trying to use a Power Bank battery pack to run small things that don't use much power. I have four phone charger power banks and they all need 40-50mA of load to keep them running, otherwise they turn off. The turn off times range from 5, 30 and 40 seconds. The 5 second on...

Yay, the board almost worked straight off the hot-plate. But there was a hidden short between the USB-Micro USB- pin and shield. It took a few attempts with the soldering iron turned up to 410 degrees and lots of flux to clear that one. NameBadge_v0.11_PCB.jpg As I mentioned in the last post, I chan...

PCB version 0.10. All the sensors on the board turned out ok. I somehow fixed the SK6812 footprint - but then I must have reverted (CTL+Z) it back to the old footprint and I didn't notice. Ouch! I have coded up the LIS2 3Dof accelerometer so that the display text will be the correct way up to match ...

Yes, yet another SW Maker soldering practice PCB. This one is based around the 'Simon Says' game, in which you attempt to press a sequence of buttons following the computers pattern. It's a mixture of thru-hole and 0805 SMD parts and can be powered via a 3V CR2032 battery, or a USB Micro cable. This...