South West Makers

The Adelaide Makerspace hosted a show and tell evening as part of the National Science week. I was luckily enough to be able to attend and display some of my PCB I have recently created. This included the current version of the e-Paper Name Badge project. I am on the road, so I have some time for so...

I saw these nice looking i2C based rotary encoders on Adafruit: https://www.adafruit.com/product/4964 and thought it might be fun to make one based around a ESP32-Pico MCU. This MCU includes a crystal built into it and some flash memory. I am not using the WiFi section for this project. It is progra...

I have been fascinated by e-Paper since the technology was announced long time ago now. Back in 2017 a few of us did a group buy and purchased some black and white and a tri-coloured black/white and red e-Paper displays. These worked with the Waveshare ESP8266 and ESP32 universal e-Paper controllers...

I laser cut my own plastic stencils at home. To make it easier to export the KiCAD Front Paste layer, I created a KiCAD V5.1 plug-in. This might need to be re-written for KiCAD V6? It took a bit or experimenting to figure out and mine was based on this sites: http://scottbezek.blogspot.com/2016/04/s...

The PCB has arrived and the other day I made up 5 of these handy PCB's that list all the switch info I need: You can find all the details at the Gitlab repo: https://gitlab.com/parkview/Switch-Parkview-Sampler

This PCB has been superseded by a PCB that incorporates a DFN1006 and SOT-23 footprint breakout: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=2461#p3784 AND more importantly - space to write the name of MOSFET that's been soldered into place!

With feedback from my SOT-23 breakout PCB, in that I need a space to write on the breakout PCB what MOSFET is soldered into place, I redesigned the PCB for a small 3mm x 9mm blank area. I then realised I could incorporate a SOT-23 mounting pads as well. This now gives me a 2 in 1 breakout PCB - bonu...

The blue acrylic sign PCB works really well and I am very happy with it. It is however around 44mm wide, so it won't fit into the initial MDF housing I made, so I designed up a new wider and a bit taller housing. It's made from stacked up layers of MDF and included provision of a USB Micro extension...

Looking forward to seeing the end product.

Ever in need of a solenoid? I recently completed testing three different solenoids to see how far they could each drive a golf ball up a ramp: https://robotsgo.blogspot.com/2021/06/w ... mpare.html

To do this I designed up and laser cut up a 3mm MDF ramp:

It occurred to me the other day that I hadn't seen a hobbyist level electronic laser beam alignment device. I have designed up a simple electronic target PCB to test my theory out. In real life, it will need a lot more sensors, but first I need to cheek if the laser will destroy the IR sensor. This ...

I held off on submitting this for production so I could submit a few other PCB designs at the same time. It's cheaper this way. During the wait, the SOT-23 Breakout PCB's arrived and while building a few of them, I realised that there was no room to write what kind of MOSFET was being soldered into ...

While participating at a Steamhead residency, I noticed that James like to solder up a special combination of USB input/output cables, an alligator clip and two JST-PH connectors, along with a healthy does of electrical tape to hold them all together. I came across this combo again recently and thou...

This is kind of the https://forum.swmakers.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=2463 big brother. It has USB power input and output, along with two lots of mirrored WS2812 (Neopixel), RGB LED outputs. There is provision to solder three wires for say a black JST cable to run direct to a RGB LED string. 3V or 3.3V...

There are times when you want an easy way to bump a 3.3V logic data signal up to 5V. One case is when you want to use an ESP32/EPS8266 to drive some WS2812 (Neopixel) family of RGB LEDs that operate on 5V. There are a few ways of doing that, but one method is via a SN74LVC1T45DRL IC. It's about the ...

The SOT-23 Breakout PCB arrived the other day. I soldered up two AO3401 and two AO3400 SOT-23 MOSFETs onto some of the breakout PCB's. One thing I didn't take into account, is that I didn't leave enough 'white space' to carefully write the name of the MOSFET onto the PCB. SOT-23-Breakout_Sml.jpg The...

My wife loves her rotary fabric cutter, however the long lasting blades eventually are no longer sharp enough to cleanly cut multiple layers of fabric. Instead of throwing this one away, she wanted it re-purposed as a thread cutter. For some projects, she will chain a series of triangles of fabric t...

The new updated PCB arrived last week and it didn't take too long to solder up on the hotplate, here it is running a small Z80 test LED program that I wrote up: RPi-Z80.jpg I am very happy with how this (eventually) turned out and am looking forward expanding to James's program a bit more so that th...

Hmm, in the past JLCPCB doesn't like making PCB's smaller than 15mm x 15mm. But allowing for a 0.1mm V-Cut kerf, I can fit 140 of these into less than 10cm x 10cm PCB, so five panels will give me 700 breakout boards. I am most probably only going to use 10 or so in my life? Here is a portion of the ...

This afternoon Hack-a-Day had a posting from someone that created a discrete component DIP8 555 timer PCB that's just a bit bigger than the IC: https://hackaday.com/2021/05/11/smallest-discrete-transistor-555-timer/ Just yesterday I was pondering on what kind of component size that was smaller than ...