Arduino Compatible Mini USB Host Board

Well, its time to finally get this project "out there". I've been sitting on it for months putting together a bunch of cool little projects for this board and the video above shows off some of the cooler ones. Check out the Kickstarter page for more details as well.

Ever since I saw Kickstarter the first time I've been wanting to give this a shot so I could learn the ins and outs of doing small scale manufacturing from home. Because this is not a product, but a platform or hacker tool I am not super confident there is a substantial enough market for it but I cannot know if I don't try.

The plan if this succeeds is to give all the boards a final value engineering assessment and put the project out to bid. I've already done this with a Florida shop called Tropical Assemblies as well as with Seeedstudio. I'm not super excited with Seeeds PCB quality so I think I'll skip them but the good news is that the local fab shop had similar prices so at least I'll know that I can call and complain if anything goes wrong.

An issue has already cropped up with the Joystick shield. A part I used in the BOM is no longer available anywhere. I'll contact the vendor and verify its availability or lack thereof and reevaluate. I've already got a backup plan but it will require a two sided board which is going to kill the bottom line. No matter, this is more about learning this home manufacturing process then about any profit motivation so we are just going to drive it hard and fix what breaks.

Many thanks to Freeside for all the support and camaraderie.

Comments

A Capacitive-Touch Janko Keyboard: What I Did at the 2017 Georgia Tech Moog Hackathon

Last weekend (February 10-12, 2017) I made a Janko-layout capacitive-touch keyboard for the Moog Werkstatt at the Georgia Tech Moog Hackathon. The day after (Monday the 13th), I made this short video of the keyboard being played: "Capacitive Touch Janko Keyboard for Moog Werkstatt" (Text from the video doobly doo) This is a Janko-layout touch keyboard I made at the 2017 Moog Hackathon at Georgia Tech, February 10-12. I'm playing a few classic bass and melody lines from popular and classic tunes. I only have one octave (13 notes) connected so far. The capacitive touch sensors use MPR121 capacitive-touch chips, on breakout boards from Adafruit (Moog Hackathon sponsor Sparkfun makes a similar board for the same chip). The example code from Adafruit was modified to read four boards (using the Adafruit library and making four sensor objects and initializing each to one of the four I2C addresses is remarkably easy for anyone with moderate familiarity with C++), and ...

Atlanta Cosplay Meetup: Group Build Update #3

It's been a while since we posted a progress report for the Atlanta Cosplay Meetup's ongoing project, and with Dragon Con right around the corner, we're nearing the finish line. Let's take a look and see what's been going on the last few months! Check out our previous progress reports here: Progress update #1 Progress update #2 Read on to see where we're at now...

What to Do With a Stack of Picture Frames?

When You Have Too Much Free Stuff! Our newest member Raul got his hands on a stack of about 40 picture frames that were being junked. On a general note Freeside tends to discourage large piles of objects randomly appearing as it tends to collect in corners. Raul got permission from our projects team with a time limit of a few weeks. In this case unnecessary, as the membership more or less attacked the pile of boxes and rapidly rendered them into things. Unfortunately starting off all the frames looked something like this: Not terribly useful. We don't even have any idea who these guys are. After a few passes through the planer, however, we get something like this: A perfectly good picture frame useful for stuff. First idea was to push a couple of these through a the laser cutter. Concept good, aim.... Aim was a little off. Also we had just rebuilt the laser computer and electronics so there were a couple of kinks to work out in CamBam's post processor: &nbsp ...

Freeside Atlanta

Search This Blog