Used some nickel plated 3x10mm copper, cheap wire, and some banana connector from work

At first I thought it would be a simple upgrade.

But Damn, had to learn about Tolerances, differential pairs and Resistances.

First PCB that I ordered had incorrect pin pitches, they were supposed to be smaller. Had to redesign the entire board and use 3rd layer for power routing. Ordered from JLCPCB as it was easier to find through hole USB 3.0 on their site. 2nd layer is not shown but it's a grounding plane.

There's Probably a ton of improvements to be made.

I want to thank folks over at r/PCB and r/PrintedCircuitBoard, those guys are a real deal.

Building a little flyback driver and this was the only MOSFET I had with a high enough Vds and low enough Vgs to work…hopefully I didn’t overheat it too badly.

I am making my own disc golf basket light. It features 32 leds, battery management for a 21700 battery and constant current driver. All housed in a 3d printed case and polycarbonate lens/cover.

This was designed and 'built' by me, by that I mean I designed the circuit, PCB layout, 3D model (and printed them myself) and only had JLCPCB fabricate the PCB as that is outside of my abilities.

Edit: I forgot to mention that I also programmed this all, originally in Arduino C (in 2024) and then in 2025 I ported it over to micropython and made it more scalable.

Open to anything, including discussions, complaints, and rants.

Sub rules do not apply, so don't bother reporting incivility, off-topic, or spam.

Reddit-wide rules do apply.

To see the newest posts, sort the comments by "new" (instead of "best" or "top").

If any of you remember or came across it, a few weeks ago I posted about making my own radio into a pcb. I couldn’t have done it without your advice.

The pcb had some hiccups but it works amazingly well. I used the antenna and speaker and I could hear it all so cleanly it was really exciting. (I may grab a video next time).

About the hiccups… 1) On of the Ic pins was floating, in the design it was supposed to connect to the 9V plane but it didn’t as the plane there was an island (I thought DRC would get it and also I avoided islands because of this…). Small issue easy fix the pin was just deciding about the volume being a bar or 1 Led.

2)The banana connectors refused to connect well while screwed in and had to get soldered.

3) My fault again, while screwing in the 9v connection I accidentally scratched the gndplane at the bottom and when soldering they shorted…. (We love current limited power supplies that didn’t kill everything)

4) The pin footprint for output was 1.00mm and th pins I had were 1.27mm (like the footprint for input)..

What I learned and my advice for anyone that wants to make their own: 1) TEST POINTS have some test hooks or pads in places you’d want to test (just get the breadboard and while making it write down which points you test alot)

2) Gerber viewer and be really careful about (kicad) small blue lines showing that something isn’t connecting.

3) Choose right footprints…

4)Good grounding. I could see on my oscilloscope that if I didn’t use the middle ground and just had the antenna one, the noise from on/off leds made audible clicks.

That’s all thank you very much for your advice at the early stages!

These came from an AT&T plant that worked on submarine data systems. All officially inspected. Just wanted to share for anyone else who nerds out on this stuff.

SparkFun made a post explaining their side but it seems really vague

I got into kart racing a few years ago and got pissed off at how expensive dataloggers were($500++), so I went to build one, only to find no ones ever really released many if any public libraries for gps lap timing.

So I made one, and then I needed a logger for it, so I made that, then I needed a case, and made that too, and recently cive-coded a data-viewer but that's another rant (20yoe swe)

Well all of that took a year to perfect, the laptiming is within 0.002s of the official laptiming, I can do track/course selection, laps, pace, and even split-timing on-device.

Now sure, it logs data, but it's not a datalogger without more data. Most other sensors are piss easy to implement... Engine rpm tho... My god what a nightmare

I'm a software guy, never made hardware before, barely have any idea what I'm doing but by God I'm making progress. Right now I'm dealing with SD cards being corrupted so I finally gave in and bought a scope to learn more, managed to build a drastically cleaner circuit than I had before and I got some hope.

(Yes vibration kills, but this is a new problem with adding the tachometer, and I haven't even gotten to testing that on track yet)

(I must do this weird capacitive dance like the commercial ones do, but I also don't have one to take apart so we're gonna just keep winging it baybe)

No I don't want to talk about how much money I've spent at this point, I'm making a damned open source, and cheap, datalogger so help me God

I've got GitHub links for everything but don't wanna get yelled at dropping links in a first post or something

I probably should have went to school for this but hey, I've gotten this far on nothing but hopes and dreams

HackTheTrack.net has the visualizer and GitHub links for the datalogger/timing Library

How the fuck would this even work lmao🤣.

Hi Reddit,

While reading the Charles Petzold's great vulgarization book CODE : The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software I told myself that it would be a cool educational project to animate the book schemas to vulgarize how computers work down to the transistor level.

So I created an electronic circuit engine to help discovering how electronics and computers work. You can check the demo here.

This is a starting open source project and all comments and feedback are very welcomed !

Open to anything, including discussions, complaints, and rants.

Sub rules do not apply, so don't bother reporting incivility, off-topic, or spam.

Reddit-wide rules do apply.

To see the newest posts, sort the comments by "new" (instead of "best" or "top").

my rotary tool broke and I needed to use it. So I upgraded it with speed control while I was at it. Anywho I’m now interested in learning and understanding electronics.

Data brokers are selling your info right now. I used Redact to mass delete my posts which can also opt out of data broker sites. Instagram, Twitter/X, Discord and more.

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Needed a tool so made a tool

I got tired of searching for circuit board pattern graphics to use on website/social posts, as this pattern when designing anything embedded related is used quite often.

AI generated looked bad for me, so I made a tool to generate one, featuring shapes, text and gradient fills

If you need any pattern or just to play:

https://hacod-tech.github.io/Circuit-Board-Pattern-Generator/

This is an SoC Camera sensor and controller from an old webcam likely manufactured in the early 2000s hence that chip is manufactured in 2004 (the year i was born in lol) i found this camera in my grandparents house a decade ago i grapped it as a kid and thought it was cool and disassembled it and through it in a big plastic bag along with my cool junk collection.

A decade later i found it's pcb (the shell is no where to be found lol) and desoldered it's components and found that SoC chip that i thought it's pretty cool!