Greg

Electrical schematic showing pin ordering into a connector. Next to the PCB layout which has silkscreen that in no way matches.

Why is my circuit board lying to me 🥲

“I’d rather write the hw” much easier 😆😆🤣

Impedance control is a myth. A term made by big circuit to sell more ground planes. /s

Smoke test passed! 🔥
Voltages all look good

Circuit board propped up on a mechanical pencil

Circuit board in-front of a red coffee mug

Circuit board in-front of a red coffee mug

😍 Freshly assembled, still not sure if the design even works 🫣

Assembly view of circuit board showing every decoupling capacitor highlighted

Decoupling? Yes. ✅

Circuit board with solder paste applied

Circuit board with solder paste applied

Circuit board with solder paste applied

Circuit board with solder paste applied

A nice solder paste application 🫠

Circuit boards alongside a 3d printed enclosure, solder paste stencil and some tools.

Circuit board macro photo

Circuit board macro photo

Circuit boards are in! 👌

CAD view of an enclosure designed around a circuit board

Designed a quick and simple 3d printed case

Unfortunately not, this is actually an old ButterStick r0.2

I've been using KiCad 9's new table features to aid in schematic documentation.

I guess it makes sense.. But still puzzled me for a moment that you can perform a vertical/horizontal mirror on a single cell. 🙃

3d CAD showing a fillet inside a corner of a part, the geometry is using native rounded surfaces, and looks clean.

Much better 😍

View from 3d CAD, showing a rounded corner of an object, except it's not actually round, rather lot of straight lines.

Glad I can jump back in the timeline. Found the culprit!

Top object is an imported PCB, arcs on the board outline get converted to straight-line segments when it's exported from KiCad.

The purple lines are projected from this PCB outline. Then I've applied an offset to account for tolerance.

3d CAD showing a rounded surface, that is made up small flat planes, rather than a continuous arc. A fillet has created awkward joins to these flat planes.

Whoops, it's quick and easy to simply base 3d geometry off a KiCad board outline. But the topology has caught up to me. 🫠

Hand holding a circuit board with diffusion pattern

Designed this board years ago, and finally ordered it. The pattern looks really cool on the physical boards.

github.com/gregdavill/a...

Circuit board with curved differential pairs

Circuit board with component footprints

Circuit boards ❇️

Circuit board with fancy silkscreen art

They've arrived ✨

Circuit board render

Circuit board render

Board is fully routed now, somehow it all fits.

Same sized FPGA as the Butterstick, but on a board less than half the size

Was initially planning on using the smaller ECP5 package, I have a few 85F5G's spare from OrangeCrabs. That package requires 0.15mm drills or uvias. Compared to the larger package. Moving more parts to the back of the board freed up the extra space needed.

Circuit board rendering. A USB-C port and chips are visible. The board is labelled ECP Breaker r3p0

KiCad PCB design showing a large BGA package and routing on 6 Layers

Had an idea, and I nerd-sniped myself into building it...

Similar idea to the last ecpbreaker design, but adding the 5Gbps SERDES to enable USB3. The ECP5's serdes supports display-port, so you could probably do some cool alt-mode stuff, but currently only routed for SS USB.

1×7 FlipDot stripe (5 pcs) FlipDots are like LEDs form another time and the best part of it: they can even display information without any current. FlipDots are driven by a coil wound around a metal core, that can hold its m…

I bought mine from here a couple of years ago. hannio.org/en/produkt/1...

Rending of a circuit board, Components and soldermask look pretty realistic.

Spun up a new design to add an ESP32-C3 module to the back of the flip-dot module, along with DC power input.

Got a little carried away in inkscape for the silkscreen.
Trying out github.com/30350n/pcb2b..., a plugin that is in the KiCad PCM for exporting textures directly into blender, works great

Turns out if your riscv code causes an exception before the handler is configured and the core triggers a load access exception, you’ll be in a loop that never exits. Apologies for creating… checks notes… 1.8TB trace logs 😵‍💫🫢

Do they use microdrives? that can be replaced with Compact Flash? Or did it make use of a 1.8” HDD?

I miss my Creative Zen, which was HDD based. Crazy the engineering that went into miniaturisation of hard drives because NAND was still so expensive.

Components on solderpaste. The center of the image is two resistors back to back sitting sideways on the space typically taken by a single resistor.

Components on solderpaste. The center of the image is two resistors back to back sitting sideways on the space typically taken by a single resistor.

When you don't have the exact part... Just place a parallel combination 🙃

SPI decode, showing 9bit packets

✨🙌

Not sure I'd call it "modern" though 😅

Australian dollar coin with a surface mount 32.768kHz crystal component.

Australian dollar coin next to ruler. The ruler has a surface mount 32.768kHz crystal component, showing about 3mm in length.

Macro photo of a ruler with surface mount 32.768kHz crystal component, showing about 3mm in length. The glass top of the components shows the internals

Macro photo. A surface mount 32.768kHz crystal component a glass top of the components shows the internals. A tuning fork structure is visible.

When you realise that one method of creating a 32.768kHz crystal is literally just a miniature tuning fork structure.
MEMs oscillators do this to, but at another level of miniaturisation.
The lid of this one is glass and you can see that it's been laser-trimmed through likely through the window

For me it’s just on FPGAs which only provide JTAG

Circuit board with a connector labelled JTAG. The circuit board has LEDs along the front with various silkscreen labels. The connector has cables attached that are vibrant colours. Red, blue, green, yellow, white and black.

JTAG 🌈