Diptrace slots full#
Diptrace slots series#

This got us to STM32F0 series - the simplest in STM32 family. With a LIDAR on I2C bus and a display on SPI, more or less any MCU would do the trick. We tend to use STM32 controllers as a default choice. So here we are - armed with a LIDAR and a display, we downloaded a free version of DipTrace (same as Eagle, it has a free version with limited functionality for non-commercial use ) and started our design. As the laser itself uses IR waves, we decided we would add a 3.3V output for a laser pointer, so that we could see where we are aiming with the sensor. Thus, there would be a button to set the distance. The display would continuously output current reading on the green background if the distance is within the range, or on the red background otherwise. We thought of a board which attaches to the display and has a connector to hook up a range finder. The idea of the project was to have a board, which would monitor the presence of an object in front of the sensor, by continuously measuring the distance and comparing it to pre-selected value. There's not much to loose here - even if we don't fall in love with it, we'll have a Gerbers export tutorial for another EDA. Thus, we decided to take a DipTrace for a spin - we've heard some good things about it. We started to get a feeling, that the layout process is more involving with Eagle than it could have been. Thus, we threw in a couple of 0402 resistors so that next time we could confidently say that we've been there and done that.Īnd finally we wanted to evaluate alternatives to Eagle - our EDA of choice, at the moment. So we could only reply that we don't see any reasons why something would go wrong with 0402s. For whatever reason, so far we have been sticking to 0603 components. On top of that, we regularly get questions if Cirqoid is any good for 0402 components. This controller uses SPI bus, so connection is supposedly relatively straight-forward and there's no need for a powerful MCU.

Diptrace slots full#

We also had a 2.2' LCD display module with ILI9341 controller lying around and wanted to see if it can be used as a generic output device for small projects like that - something a bit fancier than 16x2 text LCD but not a full blown display which requires plenty of MCU resources. We got a LIDAR-Lite laser range sensor and we wanted to see what it is capable of: Things start to look brighter now, so here we are with a new post.

It meant we had to sacrifice some other things and blogging was among them. We've been struggling for quite some time to meet the demand on Cirqoids, so we focused our efforts on streamlining the production. Such long that we even got an email asking if we are still in business.

It's really been a very long while since our last blog post.