South West Makers

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...

I have been playing around with ePaper displays for a while now. These are usually dedicated PCB's that I have built for different functions, but I don't have a plain breakout board. One where I can just connect up a ePaper and then connect the breakout to any embedded controller that I like. So, he...

I will preference this saying that a a Felix 3.x printer, the Home point is on the back right hand side of the printer. Where I have it setup, it's a bit of a pain to reach, so my startup script brings the printhead up to the front of the printer to purge/extrude 10mm of filament, then returns back ...

Amongst everything else going on, I managed to get the (Now calling it) USB Power Profiler Board sent off to JLCPCB this morning. It ended up being a bit more complex than the V0.6 block diagram, so it should be interesting to see how it turns out. It would be great if it can measure down to the 10'...

Well, somehow the Australian Postal system lost this and another PCB from JLCPCB during shipping. This was during C19 dark days here in WA, so fair enough. Since the loss, I have discovered two things about this PCB: 1) the WS2812 foot print was wrong 2) the MOSFET driving the e-Paper power was in b...

I have been hanging out to try a ESP32-S3 MCU. I have been watching stock on LCSC over my last few orders, but none of the WROOM series are listed in stock, so after watching a Unexpected Maker video , I bit the bullet and decided to make my own Dev board. I wanted to have a go at adding SPI based 1...

The 2nd version PCB's arrived last week, and I jumped in and assembled them and I think they came out looking really nice: Controller Front: OPJ-Controller_V0.6_sml.jpg Driver Front: OPJ-Driver_V0.6_sml.jpg So the changes between the V0.5 and V0.6 PCB versions are mainly that it now has individual A...

Today I did a full path voltage loss measurement across all active components. With a USB 5.03V input and a load of around 490mA I measured a loss of 466.4mA across the voltage regulator path. I measured a loss of 355.6mA with the voltage regulator switched out. Basically it comes down to I loose 58...