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 a...

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 Sony...

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: