Life on FR4

The simples method to manufacturing PCBs at home is the toner trasfer method.But the laser printer is the most important a part of this technic and the laser printer is expensive stuff for only printing some PCB / month. The cheapest method to manufacturing PCBs at home is using alcoholic pen and drawing the traces with your own hands . But our hands resolution or the precision is not enough in most case. The PCB plotter machine with CNC controlling are the solution of this problem. I spend my last weeks to build this PCB plotter machine from 2 CDROM driver and a floppy driver. The parameters: 38mm*38mm Workspace (enough in most case) 0.0735 mm / steep (in halfsteeping mode) Parts that is used: As I said  : 2 CDROM and 1 Floppy driver 3 * L293 Dual Full Bridge Motor Driver IC Power supply of course ATMEGA88 and USB2Serial bridge Some wires and pin headers The full cost is about 15$!! The manufacturing flow I using Eagle Cad for design the circuits and o

A few week ago I bought 5 piece  of ATMEGA88-PU on second-hand market  (www.vatera.hu).The cost was holly low about 0.3$/piece. I'm going to design and make my own arduino like development board for easy prototyping . I used Eagle Cad for designing the PCB and I used  toner transfer method for etching the PCB . Finally my first DIY PCB and my devboard for atmega88 is ready to go. This was the first prototype: Pin header for PORTB,PORTC and PORTD,ISP for Programing,GND and Vcc headers and Reset button 1 weeks later I realised some weaknesses: the power headers was broke I need to plug 2 usb device into my PC.A programer and an USB-Serial converter I can't see any heartbeat (onboard leds)  I pimped up my board with some goodness: Arduino bootloader for programing over UART (  thx  ) Extended Power headers  Onboard dual leds and voltage regulator The other stuff on the left side is USB to Serial converter from SonyEricsson USB Data cable. The full c

This article based on this page. Lcd chip: based on PCF8558 I created my own  CPU FAN controller for my PC because my cooler was generate a lot of noisy.I used this LCD to print out the temperature data and PWM duty in %. The LCD use standard I2C interface for communicating with other stuffs.You can find the pinouts on the linked site. You can find more details on my GITHUB: https://github.com/zoon81/tinnyI2C Here is some pic: