Comment by hathawsh

15 hours ago

This is an amazing resource. It was difficult to appreciate what this resource was for until I tried to create my own boards based on an ESP32. It's not really difficult to build around ESP32, it's just that I don't know what I don't know. With starting points like these, I can start with a lot more confidence. Thank you!

5 comments

hathawsh

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kreelman  8 hours ago

Copy that!

Wonderful that there's a Free version of these designs out there. The bugs and kinks will get sorted out over time.

hattmall  14 hours ago

Does this help you build a custom PCB that you would send to a factory or like just design and simulate something you could build on your own? Or both / neither? I'm not fully understanding what this project does, could you offer insight?

  • numpad0  14 hours ago

    This is File -> New Project... -> New Hello World Project. The New Project button in hardware engineering tools often don't have the trailing 3 dots.

    I think most low-end projects done in KiCad are not tested beyond making sure there's no red squiggly underlines at a glance. You are your own F5 key and assembler/runtime crash reporter. Proper circuit verification through software simulation isn't needed for most digital designs unless you do your own wireless antenna, analog amps, and/or DRAM/PCIe/GbE/etc.

    • kreelman  7 hours ago

      I like the "File -> New Project" analogy.

      I guess in theory, the original question is whether this project allows a board to be sent of for construction at a company that makes and populates boards. Yes, you could do this if you wanted to. As numpad0 has said though, it's early days for these boards and if you wanted to do something commercially reliable, you will most likely run into issues with things not being completely tested on these boards yet.

      These boards provide the ability to make your own boards to host the chipsets yourself, rather than relying on a third party providing the board. So what? What if you want USB-C? What if you want to make a square or a circular board? This project is a good step along the way to allowing you to make these kinds of things.

      On the hobbyist and corporate side, they also provide a way to provide a modern design that can use USB-C, which is becoming very common and is better than older USB options.

      As mentioned in the README.md "Available Development Boards" section, the Atmega16u2 chip was hard to come by for Hanqaqa in 2023. The Arduino guys (arduino.com ?) probably did a "lifetime buy" of these comms chips and they probably also have several shelves of fully built Arduino boards as well. Lifetime buys and keeping good stock levels mitigate the risk of difficulty building new boards... Just get one of the older working ones off the shelf and send it. However, for an organisation (even an open source board that becomes fairly popular) wanting to build their own board, not having a given comms chip is a problem. Replacing it with a commonly available one makes it much easier for people/companies wanting to build these boards in any kind of numbers.

      Having the board design readily available is really useful for the reasons above. It does seem like overkill if you just want to fiddle with a board, but if you make something that becomes popular that needs any kind of hardware adjustment, having the design becomes almost essential.