Tod's been working on a super-duper breadboard system. No doubt it has every bell and whistle imaginable piled on top of a kitchen sink. One feature is a line based LCD. Now these are real cheap these days, but they usually use a PCF8574 I2C I/O expander. Not that I2C is bad, but to write a byte into the LCD takes at least 8 I2C operations, not to mention that for whatever reason I2C takes lots of interrupts and states in the software. Serial UARTs and SPI both potentially faster and the hardware on the micro is such, you write a byte and go away.
Many DIY's shy away from surface mount resistors and capacitors in boards they design. But I think once you do a couple it is actually quicker to use 1206 components than bending leads for through hole parts and flipping the board over and soldering, then trimming the leads.
So here I am demonstrating some SMT soldering with a 1206 resistor. Using a Hakko E80 iron, tin-lead solder, +2.50 reading glasses and a good light, nothing up my sleve.
Olzeke took the lockdown and holidays to complete a KiCAD project. He built a breakout board for the LPC54005 and LCD display.
Happy New Year. Kicked off the year with a new PCB design. This design is aimed at the ARMstamp and LPC1768mBed boards, as well as Arduino and PMod peripheral boards.
Power input with 5V regulator, RJ45 Ethernet and USB for the mBed. Terminal strips on the other end and a large prototyping area,
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from Coridium. Quiet here with Nanny Newsome shutting down the state. One of our Linux users reported an error in the Show Project menu, which also would affect the search of the whole project. Some tweaks to the BASICtools Tcl code and that has been fixed. The links here and below have been updated.