TheDirty

Use the coupon and it's $4 right now. http://forum.43oh.com/topic/4371-ti-estore-25-coupon-until-30-sept-2013/ Inductive sensors aren't anything new, but I've never seen them implemented as anything but basic proximity sensors before.

Thanks for sharing. The video was great.

There has to be something wrong with your ferric chloride or possibly exposure. Warm FC should etch a board in a few minutes. I've used all the standard home etchants, and FC has given me the best etch. Quite frankly solder mask is a big waste of time for me. I just don't have much use for it. People mention how nice it is to separate the solder, but I find soldering just fine without it. No comment on the PCB layout. Looks nice to me. I have the (possibly bad) habit of trying to mash in everything as close together as possible and making the smallest board I can.

My solder paste process. Cheap solder paste from DX. http://dx.com/p/lodestar-soldering-paste-50g-4711 Syringe from DX. (just search syringes there) 18 gauge syringe tip from e-bay. You can search them. (maybe smaller gauge if you are doing smaller than 0603) I mix the solder paste with some no clean flux to the correct consistency and scoop it into the syringe. That's it. I apply and use the hot air gun to set everything. Syringes and tips are one use only unless you can find a way to clean them. I use a hot glue gun to seal the tip of the syringe after every use

I've helped a lot of people with this and all I can say once you get a method down you are golden, but even with the exact steps it takes experimentation and time to get it so it's quick and easy. You may have to modify the steps to get things to work for you. I started many years ago and got my process down. For some people now it may not be worth it to go through the learning curve, but if I want to experiment with a board or just need a little add on, I can get a board from Eagle to etched and drilled in a couple hours when waiting for Seeed can take a month or more for 10 boards were I

I do home etching fairly often. The chinese cheapo prototype places are pretty sweet, but fairly often I just need a single board for something specific. Usually just testing with a specific chip. I do toner transfer and I've been doing it for years, so I've got the process pretty set down. I tried out the acid/peroxide solution a few times, but it's just too harsh. It will cut through my resist and I get a lot of pitting. If you get bridges, just suck them up with some solder wick.

You guys suck. It's $8 in Canada for shipping. I'm sure someone from Europe is going to tell us the astronomical shipping price they have to pay.

That doesn't look bad, but overkill in terms of how much work went into making it look pretty. I'll just make a pcb that I can solder the pins to. Likely both sides of the board in an offset pattern; Probably not explaining well. It definitely needs a couple alignment pins/holes to keep the pins on target..

Wow. I was surprised by how tiny these things are. I'd like to make up my own standard 6 pin programming test pad setup. With 6 connections I can cover my most common programming headers, MSP430, Cortex SWD, and PIC.

Thanks for this and the link! I've been looking for good pogo pins for a long time.

Too bad you can't get the old ball mice. Each had two rotary encoders to track the ball movement,

The TLC5940 is not meant to multiplex lights. MAX7219 (older version of the MAX6950) is the cheapest solution in terms of LED driver chips, but it's 5V power and need 3.5V to drive the IO, so you would need a level shifter or a different microcontroller to use them. I say cheapest because you can get these real cheap from e-bay. Even then, you would need 3 for each panel, so 24 of them. 8*8 without RGB is a big project. With RGB it gets a little crazy.

Not much that can go wrong here. I did not check the pin assignements. You have two pins on the 6 pin header unconnected. I'm not certain about these headers. Are these headers going out to breakout boards that are already made for these chips? The only thing I see is that this board is a little too simple to even need to be made. The only thing you have on it other than headers is two pullups. If you are making this just as a test, that's fine, but it seems to me you can freehand wire this easier than making up a PCB in this case. EDIT: You've made your breakout board the si

Any reason you decided to use the W5200 rather than the on board ethernet controller on the LPC1769? Things have come a way since I made up a web board using a ARM7 and a W5300 in 2009. I'm glad I'm not using ARM7 anymore.

I got black boards from Seed or iTead, I don't remember which and they came out fine.

I did engine management projects a few years ago. It's an interesting project, but now aftermarket EFI has gotten much better and even aftermarket DIY engine management like the megasquirt and derivatives are pretty well worked out. For basic EFI the tough part is just the sensor input. Unless you are only supporting one vehicle, supporting all the types of sensors and all the setups reliably is tough and more of a hardware problem.

The Energy Micro devel watch does this. They have a QFP, crystal, caps, and the LCD connector mounted in holes in the board. Half way down. http://blog.energymicro.com/2012/12/12/make-a-slim-watch-with-arm-cortex-m3-efm32/

I'm just seeing this from the bump. Wow, reclaimed KIS-3R33S are about $1 each on ebay. I've been doing my DC-DC converters on PCB with components like a sucker for more money.

I got a few things from OSHpark back in the day. Unfortunately shipping to Canada kills the deal on even the really small boards.

To add to^ http://www.ti.com/lsds/ti/microcontroller/16-bit_msp430/msp430_software_landing.page Go down the page to "Code Examples". From there it will allow you to download peripheral code examples for a series of chips in either ASM or C.

When a net is unrouted between two points, just click on the point closest to the pin on the chip with the route tool and your routing will start from there. If you find the trace is moving to the side rather than straight out from the pin, then right click the mouse to change the routing method. It's worked for me with 3.3V pullups, but I have not used it often. ED up there pointed out that 3.3V is outside the spec though, so it is not guaranteed to work so a level shifter would be useful. The SMD were not for shrinking the board, they are recommended by the spec to shorten the path

Datasheet for reg711 suggests surface mount ceramic for all of the capacitors to avoid ripple. It's just a suggestion, not a requirement, but since you are already doing smt board, you might as well just take the plunge and go all SMT. Also they have a suggested layout on the datasheet as well, which includes no ground plane around the chip and capacitors.

When you connect tracks to pins of a package that is not using your grid measurements, you should start the track from the actual pin, that way it is centred exactly on the pin and you move out from there. If you are going pin to pin, start from one pin, go half way, and then restart on the other pin and connect in the middle. Usually you don't need a 5v level shifter for I2C. Since it uses pullups and just sinks current you can use 3.3V pullups and it will work with 5V devices.

Well, it sounds like you are really starting from scratch. Any controller can use some method to give simple commands to other controllers as long as it has inputs and outputs and you can program both controllers. Normally I would say UART would be the simplest, but MSP430G2231 doesn't have a UART, so SPI or I2C. SPI is much simpler to understand and bitbang if you aren't using the USI hardware, so I would use that.

Ha. I'm the opposite. This is just a hobby I got into when I was originally working on car stuff. I have several automotive related projects for race cars/motorcycles. Pretty much all digital, my analog knowledge is badly lacking. You can always just use the linear regulators for simplicity and a few heatsinks. That would work perfectly fine. If you want to be a little adventurous though I would go with a buck converter to handle the whole thing. I've never used a Buck converter that will do more than 3amps, but I see a few on Digikey that do 4amps or more. I think the thing that