The interactive schematics and gerbers are subtle but very effective.
Overall a very clear design and tone I really need to follow for my own PCB projects.
Do you prototype all this on a breadboard before making the PCB and picking specific parts? I'd be curious to hear more about your process. I feel like I always need to test everything I build on a breadboard first since I inevitably miss some small detail if I go straight to schematic + PCB design.
Do you have any books you recommend on electronics? I feel I understand the basics, like what various components do in isolation, but would love to level up and understand circuit design like how you are approaching it here
One thing I wanted to add - I recommend placing a large-ish cap (22u) when using ferrite bead\inductor, as you can get ringing/oscillation otherwise.
I got to the part about 3.3V being derived from 5V and thought to myself "why not get it from 24V?" and then just a tiny bit later, there's the bit about USB and how Starfish can just take 5V from the USB host, and it clicked.
I also learned about Sparkfun's QWIIC connector in the aside about the chosen i2c bus switch having two "extra" channels. Love it, thanks for the article, Thea.
> why not get it from 24V?
There are DC-DC converters in that same family that can do 4.75~36V -> 3.3V, but since I needed the 5V anyway for the LEDs and I/Os, tossing an inexpensive and small LDO for 5V -> 3.3V is an easy call.
I'm blown away by the awesome inline KiCad visualizations. Did you use any tooling for capturing the layout view so the layers could be overlapped so easily?
Any thoughts on making a library for this so others can build sites as beautiful as yours? It'd be a great tool for sure. As noted elsewhere in the comments, your documentation is top notch.
Thanks!
This website has a cool implementation of a KiCad web viewer:
It's not a "pick and place" until you've got the cameras and alignment working.
If you're interested in how the LumenPnP handles vision, you can check out the OpenPNP project which handles all of the computer vision involved.
I truly hope your machine gets past that point, because it would be really good to have a genuine, open-source pick and place machine. With the current advances in ML/AI and running on graphics cards, it should be within the realm of a hobbyist nowadays.
I wish you good luck and hope to see your stuff on one of the crowdfunding sites one day.
Sopa-box time! Screw terminals suck. They're just... the default.
Great Scott had a good overview of some alternatives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE3CjZ0BUFo
And in the final analysis of that video they measured out to 22 mohm so they note they’re fine for low current work.
Screw terminals don’t suck - they have their applications and they’re economical.
I'm actually running completely custom firmware that I wrote specifically for this board that's written in C and uses Raspberry Pi's pico SDK. It's similar to Marlin/Klipper in that the host communicates via gcode over USB serial and that movement commands are more or less done the same, but it gives me the flexibility to simplify the whole host view of the pneumatics. It absolutely wasn't necessary for me to this, I just wanted to.
