Jan 19

PCBArt

Authors Note: While PCBWay has offered to sponsor a run of the boards, everything purchased for this post was paid for out of pocket and without their knowledge. I wanted to make sure they were good on my own.

Hey All,

I’m a collector. I like to collect things. Video games, Raspberry Pis, Pokemon cards, and Pins. I don’t have many pins, but they really appeal to me. It’s like pixel art. Making awesome designs with limited colors on a small canvas.

The department I work for has always made our own logos for our teams and projects. We usually print stickers and give them out at conferences, or to our students when they hit certain milestones (like their first commit).

Techrangers Logo

A eureka moment hit when PCBWay contacted me this month asking if they could sponsor my next PCB board. I’m not ready to make another PiPlay run of boards (we are slowly working on version 2), but I loved the silkscreen art I was able to put on our original run.

What if I could turn our teams logo into a PCB?

I quickly started investigating and found an awesome plugin for Inkscape called SVG2Shenzen!

I use Inkscape for a lot of things, mostly for setting up projects on the Lasercutter at FamiLAB, but I never thought of using it to create PCBs! The boards came out amazing!

PCBWay

Pros:

  • The boards I received from PCBWay.com blew me away.
  • I was not expecting much for $5 (+ $15 shipping from China).
    • I ordered the boards on Saturday, they shipped them out on Wednesday, and they were in my hands by Friday.
  • The production speed is incredible.
  • They audit every board before you pay and begin production.

Cons:

  • The ordering experience was a little clunky.
    • I had to input my dimensions and order details BEFORE uploading my Gerber files. Other PCB manufacturers usually get order details from the Gerbers.
  • Because I was making pins, I didn’t need anything drilled. This caused the audit to fail, and due to the timezome difference, their message to me and my reply caused a 20 hour delay in production. edit: Adding a note to ignore the drill file for my second order caused it to pass the audit test without delay.

The Pros HEAVILY outweigh the very minor Cons I experienced. I will have zero problem using them from now on for my board needs!

Using SVG2Shenzen

https://github.com/badgeek/svg2shenzhen

Once the plugin is installed, you goto Extensions->Prepare Document and click on Apply.

This will generate a new vector document with layers for each layer of the board. Each layer represents a portion of the boards manufacturing. They are:

  • Drill
    • Parts of the board to be drilled out
    • Example: Holes for a key-chain, or for through hole parts like a resistor or LED
  • F. Silk
    • Front of the board’s silkscreen
  • F.Mask
    • Front of the board mask – I have found that the Mask and Copper should be the same design
  • F. Cu
    • Front of the board copper
  • B. Silk
    • Back of board silkscreen
  • B. Mask
    • Back of board mask – Again I have found that the Mask and Copper should be the same design
  • B. Cu
    • Back of board copper
  • Edge.Cuts
    • This is the shape of your board that will be cutout.

When you are happy with your layout, click on Extensions -> Export Kicad, and click apply.

You will now need to open the generated *.kicad_pcb file in Kicad’s pcb tool pcbnew.

You can check a render of your finished board by going to View->3D Viewer. You can change all the colors and see what your finished board will probably look like. If its good, it’s time for the most important step! Generating your gerbers!

Click on File-> Plot to open up the plotter dialog. Select your output directory, and leave the settings as default for now. Click on Plot and a bunch of files will be generated in that directory. These are the files you send to your manufacturer to generate a PCB for you!

Congrats, you made a board!

Happy Birthday To Me!

On another note… I turned 35 this month. Happy Birthday to Me! I couldn’t have had a happier birthday. Spending a nice day with my Wife and Son, watching the little dude play on a swing-set his Grandpa’s built in our backyard.

Have a good one all! – Shea

May 28

Politics and PCBs

Hey All,

This has been a fun month.  Between campaigning, work, and Raspberry Pi stuff, I’ve been busy 😀

Politics

So I’ve been campaigning a lot this month.  I am running for the District 49 Representative in Florida’s House.  I love my district.  One thing that is crazy to me is the amount of money being put into this election.  I have raised around $2000.  I’m very proud of that number.  It’s coming from friends and family who believe in me.  It’s humbling.  My Republican opponent has raised around ~$7000.  I’m sure it’s more now. And now there is a second Republican who has entered the race.  On the other side, my Democrat opponent has raised over $90,000!  $90,000.  That is an absurd amount of money for a State House race.  I’ve heard the average is around $40,000.  

That is insane to me.  That’s a scholarship, a car, someone’s student loans.  And instead it’s going to a campaign for ad buys and t shirts.  I hate it.  I truly believe campaigns should be publicly funded at all levels.  On that note, I can’t help but see the irony in me asking for donations: https://donate.sheasilverman.com

PCBs

In other news, the first revision to the PiPlay Advance PCBs came in, and they are awesome!

Conferences

This week I was in San Antonio, Texas for the IMS Global Learning Impact Leadership Institute conference, where I gave two presentations on the LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) standards.  I was also there because my team at UCF won 2nd place in the LTI App Challenge for ProctorHub, our free passive proctoring software!

 It was a very different conference than I am used too.  Most of the software conferences I have been to have been very low level.  Getting into the nuts and bolts of how things work.  These educational conferences are very high level.  It’s an interesting paradigm change but I think we got some good stuff done.  I was able to give anecdotal evidence regarding some of the gaps in the current standards, and what could be done to improve them at all levels.  Stuff I introduce today will help to change the shape of educational software in the next few years.  

MegaCon is also this weekend.  I’ll have some pictures up from that event soon.

Have a good weekend!

-Shea

Apr 12

AdvanceMAME 1.4 and AdvanceMESS 1.4 for Raspberry Pi3

Hey All,

I compiled AdvanceMAME 1.4 and AdvanceMESS 1.4 for the Raspberry Pi3.

On the Pi3, games like Street Fighter II and The Simpsons run like butter with full audio.  It’s great!

You can download them here:

http://sheasilverman.com/rpi/raspbian/pi3/advancemame_1.4-1_armhf_pi3.deb

http://sheasilverman.com/rpi/raspbian/pi3/advancemess_1.4-1_armhf_pi3.deb

To install run:

sudo dpkg --force-all -i advancemame_1.4-1_armhf_pi3.deb
sudo dpkg --force-all -i advancemess_1.4-1_armhf_pi3.deb

On another note, our first “PiPlay Advance” boards came in:

2016-04-05 (3) 2016-04-05 (2) 2016-04-05 (1) 2016-04-05

There was of course an issue with our pin routing, so we had to order a new revision of the boards.  So excited to see this project start coming together!

-Shea

Mar 18

Friday Post: Cool Stuff

Hey All,

Got some cool stuff to post!

First off, got my Pi3 and have pics to show.

IMG_20160305_123135035_HDR IMG_20160305_123142557_HDR IMG_20160305_123151811_HDR IMG_20160305_123201893 IMG_20160305_123221663 IMG_20160305_123230360 IMG_20160305_123255506 IMG_20160305_123303098 IMG_20160305_123338411Love this device so much!

BUT, what I’m more excited to show off is a very early prototype of a project a coworker and I are working on!

12722257_10104959026967052_78897063_oIt’s a Raspberry Pi Zero powered portable gaming system styled after the Nintendo GameBoy Advance using an SPI TFT and some other little cool things.

This is the first PCB I’ve ever helped design, and I placed the order for it this week.  Boards shipped today, which means they will get here between 8 and 40 days.  Argh, the waiting sucks!

On another note, Pokken Tournament came out today for the Wii U.  It’s a really cool Tekken inspired Pokemon fighting game and so far I am loving it!  My Nintendo Network ID is SSilver2k2 so if you want to fight, add me 😀

I also picked up some really cool Nintendo retro consoles this week.

IMG_20160318_212020422 IMG_20160318_212026477 IMG_20160318_212054261 IMG_20160318_212134085

This is the Sharp Famicom Twin.  It is the Japanese version of the NES (Famicom) and the Famicom Disk System combined into one unit.  I also picked up the Family BASIC addon which allows you to do rudimentary programs in BASIC (HuBASIC) for the NES.  BASIC programs can be saved and loaded off of a cassette tape player, or loaded from any audio player.

Have a good weekend all!

-Shea