For Sale: Awesome prototyping boards, MOSFET+Touch Sensor modules

[espruino-discuss3]

Posted at 2015-11-17 by DrAzzy

As some of you may know, I sell circuit boards on Tindie. What you may not know is how wide a variety of products I sell there, and just how awesome they are. So I thought I’d write about some of my products, because I think a lot of people playing with Espruino would like them.

Prototyping board is one of my major product areas. I’ve been very disappointed with readily available prototyping board - it’s either too expensive, of miserable quality (no mask, no through holes), or of a useless design (like “perfboard”, where none of the holes are connected together). Also, prototyping board that combines SMD prototyping area with through-hole prototyping areas is quite uncommon, despite the fact that increasingly, all the best components are coming out in SMD packages only.

The large board has been discussed here in the past. It’s a 4” x 4” board, which your Espruino Pico can be mounted to, with tons of through-hole prototyping space, and surface mount pads for SOIC/TSSOP, RGB LEDs (or WS2812’s), SOT-23-6, SOT-89, MSOP/DFN-12, SOT-23 MOSFETs, and a power supply section with space for 2 SOT-223 regulators. Uncommitted (but labeled) Vcc and Ground traces are run throughout the board, so ground and supply is never far away.

I also have general purpose prototyping boards running from tiny bits of protoboard less than an inch on a side for very small projects (particularly nice for adapting pinouts of connectors), up 2” x 4” prototyping boards, available with all through-holes, or mixes of SMD and through-hole.

For those of you who use the Nucleo 401 or 411 with Espruino, I’ve got a special treat - Nucleo pin descramblers! One of the greatest difficulties I have when using the Nucleo boards for prototyping is getting the connections to the Nucleo board right. The pins aren’t labled, and there aren’t many good reference points to count from, either. The overall layout is nonsensical. These nucleo port descramblers group the pins by port, in numeric order, with alternate functions noted on the silkscreen. These are available in two versions - the second version also has a group of headers for 5v, 3.3v, Vin, and Gnd.

For those of you who also use Arduino, I have a similar 4”x4” prototyping board for the Arduino Pro Mini, as well as 2” x 2” boards for ATTiny 84 and ATTiny85 - the perfect size for a typical TinyAVR project.

[espruino-discuss3]

Posted at 2015-11-17 by DrAzzy

I also sell assembled (and bare) breakout boards for logic level MOSFETs compatible with the 3.3v logic level of the Espruino; As many of you may have noticed, there is a serious dearth of MOSFETs that work with 3.3v or less on the gate available in through-hole packages - while there is no shortage at all of ones in SMD packages.

These SOT-23 breakouts (with included gate pulldown resistor) are as easy to work with as the classic TO-220 package (same 0.1” pin spacing) - and you can get SOT-23 mosfets rated for operation with a gate voltage of as little as 1.8v!

If you need more current, I sell a beefier 4-channel MOSFET breakout board. As these are larger fets, these are available with the (recommended) gate resistor to limit the current while charging/discharging the gate. These are rated for 20v, 20A, which is enough for almost any project. Coming soon - an even beefier version of the 4-channel MOSFET breakout board!

I also sell these cute little proximity/touch sensor boards based on the MTCH101. They have an open drain output and run at 2-5v Vcc. There are plenty of similar boards that have an integrated sensor (just a conductive circle or square) printed on the PCB. What sets these apart is that they do not have an integrated sensor - you can connect them to any conductive object as the sensor. They are proximity sensors, not touch sensors, so you can cover the sensor up with non-conductive material, and it will still work. The larger the conductive object used as the sensor, the more sensitive it is (very large objects make it so sensitive that’s not usable, though). The open drain output has an integrated 10k pullup resistor, and the board has a small trimpot to adjust sensitivity.

[gfwilliams]

Posted at 2015-11-17 by @gfwilliams

Wow, there's an awful lot of stuff there :)

Just to say I have some of @drazzy's early proto boards, and they're really nice.

@drazzy if you wanted to submit a PR with links to (for instance) your mosfet boards under 'buying' on http://www.espruino.com/mosfets then a few more people might find out about them?

[espruino-discuss3]

Posted at 2015-11-17 by DrAzzy

Thanks! I was thinking about that, but figured I should get your OK on that first. I'll do that :-)

[espruino-discuss3]

Posted at 2015-12-15 by DrAzzy

I've added some more little pieces of protoboard - these have been a hot seller lately!

[gfwilliams]

Posted at 2015-12-15 by @gfwilliams

Nice! I like the SOT-23 ones :)

Just for others - the image above links to the protoboard on @drazzy's store.