February 2021 Hardware Roundup

Well, what do you know? Another month has come and gone, but not without its fair share of new boards from the engineering community.

Pocket Op Amp Lab

In a recent Technoblogy blog post, David Johnson-Davies unveiled a self-contained PCB tool that allows you to experiment with the configurable op amps on the AVR DB family of processors. Based on an AVR128DB28, the Pocket Op Amp Lab shows the configuration on a 1.14" 240x135 color TFT display and lets you interactively configure it by selecting options from on-screen menus. Johnson-Davies has also shared a cookbook, which describes some projects to demonstrate practical applications of the op amps.

Binary Decoder Soldering Kit

Engineering student Jim Heaney has developed a new ATtiny1616-controlled soldering kit to introduce students to SMD soldering, while honing their binary skills at the same time. The kit includes more than 30 1206 SMD components and three SOIC packages to practice various soldering techniques on. Once assembled, the binary coder serves as a tool to help understand base-2 counting systems. Students can enter an eight-bit number using the buttons along the bottom, and the corresponding base-10 number will appear on the screen. There are two additional buttons that enable students to increment and decrement the base-10 number, and watch as the binary changes. Heaney is currently funding the device on Kickstarter for $15. 

TENEX

Transparent OLED panels are pretty cool on their own, but stack 10 of them together and you have something incredibly awesome. This is exactly what Sean Hodgins has done with TENEX, a solid state volumetric display that gives off a Blade Runner-esque, retro cyberpunk vibe. The project uses a custom circuit board with an Adafruit Feather M4 and IMU, plus a 12V power supply. Hodgins has uploaded a tutorial for those wishing to build a TENEX.

T402 Atto

Inspired by the diminutive size of DFRobot’s Beetle (20x22x3.8mm) and Seeed Studio’s Seeeduino XIAO (20x17.5x3.5mm), Alun Morris set out to see how far he could push things without custom PCB. What he came up with was an insanely small development board built around the ATtiny402 in a narrow SOIC package, measuring only 6x6x8mm (or 6x13x8mm with programming headers). The T402 Atto is Arduino-compatible with the megaTinyCore board manager, and packs a half dozen I/O pins and a UPDI pin that can be used as an input. At the base of the T402 Atto is a 1.7mm matrix protoboard that makes it possible to attach the processor and solder 0805-sized components.

Breadboard Voltmeter

Joe Wright wanted to try out the ATtiny85 and get some practice hand-soldering QFN components, so he created a basic voltmeter that sits on the power rails of a breadboard. The board simply plugs into a power and ground supply rail, taking up just a single 2x5 block of breadboard connections. 10 LEDs are implemented to indicate integer voltage ranging from 3-12V, lighting up the appropriate LED next to a series of labels. More details on the clever idea can be found in Wright’s project post.

SAM D Boards

No stranger to our monthly hardware roundups, Stefan Wagner returns to the list with a collection of SAM D designs. First up, a pair of dev boards for the ATSAMD11C14A and ATSAMD21E featuring native USB, a 3.3V voltage regulator, and Arduino IDE compatibility. Next is the SWD Programmer Stick, a CMSIS-DAP-compliant debugging probe with SWD protocol support that can be used to program SAM D and other 32-bit Arm microcontrollers. Last but not least is the SAMD Programmer Adapter, which makes it easy to flash SAM D microcontrollers in TQFP-32 or SOIC-14 packages prior to soldering.

Cheap USB to UART Converter

Hesam Moshiri has introduced a low-cost USB to UART converter based on the MCP2200, which is compatible with both 3.3V and 5V serial logic levels and employs three LED indicators for power connection, data transmission, and data reception. The module supports the serial CTS and RTS pins, and six GPIOs that can be used for direct controlling of connected devices.  

MCP39F521 Breakout

After already making a breadboard-friendly breakout for the MCP39F511, Whatnick INC wanted to try out its sibling energy monitoring IC, the 521. Looking sharp in OSH Park’s After Dark, this no-frills breakout provides a cost-effective development tool for firmware engineers to get started with integrating the ASIC on their end devices. The board is now selling on Tindie for $20.

Ledsticker

Like most developers, Nícolas F. R. A. Prado enjoys adding stickers to his laptop. However, once stuck to the lid, the novelty eventually wears off. This led Prado to explore the possibility of using an LED matrix as a sticker, and so the Ledsticker was born. His device can be glued to the lid and is powered via one of the computer’s USB ports. Hardware wise, the Ledsticker consists of a MAX7219 8x8 matrix and an MCP2210 USB-to-SPI chip running his own custom software and the MCP2210 library.

Sparkle

Say hi to Sparkle, MadLab’s seahorse-shaped badge with sparkling animations! Sold as a surface-mount kit, the board is outfitted with 20 bright red LEDs on the front multiplexed by a PIC12F1840 on the reverse side. These LEDs cycle through a sequence of patterns, which can be toggled by a touch pad that doubles as Sparkle’s eye.

UPDI Flasher

UPDI PROFI is a handy UPDI programmer and USB-UART converter from ProtoDevSruns. The small yet robust multitool offers a simple way to flash megaAVR 0-series and tinyAVR 0-series microcontrollers. The UPDI PROFI contains an ATmega328P with a Pro Mini bootloader and a USB-to-serial adapter, supports three different UPDI connectors (2.54mm six-pin, 1.27mm six-pin, and UPDI 2.5mm rounded), and includes an ISP/JTAG port for flashing firmware to current 0/1/2 MCUs and future models as well. ProtoDevSruns is selling the unit for $28 on their Tindie store.

Stay ahead with the latest hardware trends. Explore how makers are applying these innovations in real-world projects at Microchip Makes page.

Want to see more? Browse last January 2021 month’s list here.