With Eagle being having a sunset date from Autodesk and not wanting to use Autodesk Electronics (Eagle in Fusion). I looked for EDA tool alternatives. I spent a good portion of the beginning of 2024 learning and building a product in KiCad v8. See the launch video below.
After fighting KiCad for months, I gave up and will be trying out LibrePCB.
I have converted my Cyclone Pulse Wrangler circuit to LibrePCB. So far I am very happy with the tool. It needs a few QOL improvements but, overall, much more enjoyable experience then KiCad. I am not constantly looking up how to do simple actions.
LibrePCB has a REALLY good Eagle Part Library importer. One of the best I have ever used.
The tool also supports plated slots in the footprint editor natively. No “workarounds” that are required in Eagle and KiCad to pull them off.
I have only used the library and schematic editor. Both are missing more complex tools that Eagle and KiCad have but for 99% of PCB designers and users. They will never use those… and I rarely use them as well.
Both these chips are the Parallax P8X32A-Q44 purchased from the same vender (Mouser). The one on the left was purchased a month ago and the one on the right just arrived today. Anyone know if Parallax changed the etching?
It has been a week since my last post and I am sorry for that! I am currently moving to my new place in Houston where I work for Dynamic Perception. The Dual motor controller booster pack will arrive next Monday.
In my last video I showed off Lab 7 for EE445L which was the digital thermometer. To measure the temperature I used a thermistor which is a resistor that changes resistance based on the temperature.
These are non linear devices which make it a pain to get accurate readings directly.
More information on Thermistors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermistor
So I think I have been bitten by the FPGA bug. I ordered the DE0 board from Altera this morning. Should arrive by this weekend. I have been thinking of doing a “begineer series” on FPGAs much like how the Arduino introduces people into the world of microcontrollers. Would people be interested in that?
So for the new 128×32 DMD I am using a smaller dot pitch LED Matrix with a size of 1.9mm. This means they are the same size as standard DMDs used on production machines. I secured a supplier and I can provide any color LED for the DMDs. Red, Orange, Amber, Blue, Green, ect. These are currently not compatible with production machines but are intended for Home Brew Pinball machines. They are very easy to work with.
Instead of the wacky voltages of a standard DMD mine only needs a +5V supply. Standard DMDs also are hard to drive with microcontrollers because you have to fill each “level” individually and you have to do it fast enough to keep up with the refresh rate. My DMD runs off a FPGA which means you don’t have to worry about how fast you send the data to the display. The FPGA takes care of all the matrixing and color levels. All you have to do is send the data in 1byte wide chunks which is perfect for Microcontroller use. If you are doing animations you can stream data off an SD card by doing byte writes and then pushing that data directly to the DMD.
Prices will be $250 for quantities 1-9 and $240 for anything over 10. They come with the SMD parts soldered on and the FPGA pre-programmed. You will need to solder the LED modules on. The LED modules will be tested to ensure that they are in full working order.
