Theory, hardware, software and code
We talk again of Serialino, our Arduino's clone: this time the printed circuit board (PCB) design is shown.
Here beside you find a screen-shot of the PCB of Serialino, numbered 1.0.
Even from here you should be able to distinguish the areas described in the previous post.
Power supply section on the bottom-left; the communication port and IC Max232 on the top-left; the headers on top and bottom; and finally ATMega with external oscillator, then the switch button and the ICSP pin headers.
As promised last time, let's begin with the idea underlying Serialino's design.
Simply... we wanted to make everyone able to reproduce an Arduino-compatible platform at a reasonable cost, in a quite easy way thanks to the single-sided design, by focusing the communications with pc only on serial port, but without renouncing to an IC for this goal.
The choice of the IC relies upon the classical Max232.
And indeed the ATMega and Max232 are the core of the platform, the biggest components (in DIP format): as well as the ones requiring the major number of connections.
Here is the reason to center them inside the schematic.
Every package of software suite comes with an amount of collateral applications, extensions and/or libraries.
KiCad does the same; but sometimes default components aren't enough for specific goals.
Thanks to KiCad's popularity people around the world spent some of their time to enrich the base: so that you can find useful libraries or scheme directly for free on websites. Here some of them (in my opinion the most important):
Now think you don't find component you need among default and external or third-part libraries.
Two main solutions show to yourself:
...continue reading "Kicad. From Software To Hardware Part3"
For the first part, click here.
On horizontal bar look at the icon here shown: click to run PCBnew, the embedded PCB editor which to design the circuit mask on.
Editor starts with a black ground.
...continue reading "KiCAD. From Software to Hardware Part2"
We're talking about one of the most famous, useful and supported software for electronic design automation (EDA).
Other apps or packages are available to do same: Kicad is free (in sense of free software: code is publicly available), and usually at zero-cost, so that you can start with your projects, from simplest to more professional ones, without any other cost.
...continue reading "KiCAD. From Software to Hardware Part1"