5 ms·
You're exactly right. You can get a 10cm by 10cm 2 layer board with 6mil tolerances for $12 shipped, from china. Arrow will ship parts overnight with a minimum
by Hasz 9y ago
You're exactly right. You can get a 10cm by 10cm 2 layer board with 6mil tolerances for $12 shipped, from china.
Arrow will ship parts overnight with a minimum order size of $20.
Aliexpress/eBay have made discrete semiconductors and passive parts nearly free.
Writing a bit of software is incredibly easy (versus what it used to be) with a good IDE and a solid toolchain.
It's truly a great age to be involved in hardware.
- stingrae 9y ago> a good IDE and a solid toolchain This area is in much need of improvement. Keil ARM-MDK, IAR, ect. aren't cheap.
- mianos 9y agoBut platform.io is good and cheap. You can do most things with the free version and the pro version with remote debugging is pretty reasonable. The plus is, even though it is based around Atom, it's not a 20G download, as the vendor IDEs are.
- foldr 9y agoJust a note for anyone else who's interested. The site is platformio.org, not platform.io.
- sampullman 9y agoGCC for ARM is pretty great these days, although I can only vouch for it on Cortex-M. I think the code generation is on par with or better than IAR/Keil in most cases, and it's much nicer to use Intellij/VSCode/etc instead of mucking around with dated vendor IDEs. https://developer.arm.com/open-source/gnu-toolchain/gnu-rm https://developer.arm.com/open-source/gnu-toolchain/gnu-rm
- trelliscoded 9y agoI agree... as long as radios aren't involved. Getting parts with the necessary tolerances in low quantities and dealing with the board layout is kind of expensive. The analyzer you need to use to figure out why the radio is acting funny is pretty expensive too. I don't know how I could have done my senior radio project without access to my uni's pimped out RF lab. But yeah, I've made MCU boards in my toaster oven, it's fun times for little non-RF projects. The several gigabytes of stuff TI makes you install just to do hello world on their simple link products is kind of nuts though. There's nothing simple about it tbh.
- trelliscoded 9y agoI agree... as long as radios aren't involved. Getting parts with the necessary tolerances in low quantities and dealing with the board layout is kind of expensive. The analyzer you need to use to figure out why the radio is acting funny is pretty expensive too. I don't know how I could have done my senior radio project without access to my uni's pimped out RF lab. But yeah, I've made MCU boards in my toaster oven, it's fun times for little non-RF projects. The several gigabytes of stuff TI makes you install just to do hello world on their simple link products is kind of nuts though. There's nothing simple about it tbh.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]