So recently I've been intrigued by small-batch PCB fab services, like
OSH Park. Like the ready supply of components from various online sellers, it's amazing how cheap you can get boards made over the net these days. How do they do it? As I learned in
this hardware hangout, there are some neat tricks done behind the scenes to aggregate small orders into full panels sent to a fab.
But to get PCBs made, you need to be able to drive an EDA tool like
KiCad. KiCad's a beautiful open source tool, but it is quite idiosyncratic. In some spare time, I dived into the
KiCad like a Pro course and found it an excellent leg-up on the process.
The nRF24 breakout board (below) is just the first trivial exercise from the course. But it will come in handy - I have a batch of nRF24's lying around that I've been planning to experiment with, and the breakout board will be quite handy for that.
I just received my boards from OSH Park (1 month from order to delivery in Singapore - not bad, especially for $4.80 all-in). Very impressed with the board quality. Not so much with the board design! A few things I can see could be easily improved, but that's my fault (see
my notes). But they do work!
As always,
all notes, schematics and code (including the KiCad project) are in the Little Arduino Projects repo on GitHub.
