#breakoutboard

We were chatting in the forums with someone when the OPT4048 (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/texas-instruments/OPT4048DTSR/21298553) came up. It's an interesting light sensor that does color sensing but with diodes matched to the CIE XYZ color space. This would make them particularly good for color-light tuning. We made a cute breakout for this board. Fun fact: it's 3.3V power but 5V logic friendly.

We got our Allegro A4988 stepper driver breakout PCBs back and are ready to test them. First, we verified that STEP and DIR worked (yes!) and that the LEDs lit (yes, but we need to tweak the resistors to make the brightness even). Then we tried all of the stepper-settings, you can select 1, 4, 8, or 16-microsteps. All the sleep/reset/enable pins work. Finally, we checked the current limiting functionality with a potentiometer that can be twisted to select up to 2A current per coil. This directly affects the torque, so it's easy to test by verifying that we can stall the motor with hands or vise-grips. We'll order these with 2oz copper and get them into production next!

, which gives a nice clean 1A with a small bill of materials. Now you can use USB, DC, or solar to charge your favorite lipoly or liion chip and get 5V output. Maybe we'll make a version that can handle 3.6V LiFePO4 batteries, too? It's easy to set the bq to handle those by changing a single resistor.

We have a project we're working on with a BMI323 (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/b/bosch-sensortec/bmi323-inertial-measurement-unit) chip. Since this is our first time using the sensor, we decided to make a breakout for it! This chip has fast sample rates and an I2C/I3C/SPI interface. After we explore this chip, maybe we'll do an EYE ON NPI about it!

..., but that's technically discontinued - it's great because it doesn't require an MCLK that some boards like the Raspberry Pi don't have and doesn't need I2C configuration either. The PCM510x is a good family, too; it ranges from the inexpensive PCM5100 (https://www.digikey.com/short/z50cnp0h) to the PCM5102 (https://www.digikey.com/short/80z2nh3h) which has high quality output at a higher cost. This breakout could use any of the family chips & gives you all the GPIO needed with a 3.5mm headphone jack for line-level output.

It's a new year! Time to take on moooore projects! Maybe we'll replace the FONA family with LTE modules this year. The First thing we need to do is get a good SIM card holder. We don't have a breakout for one already, so we're just going to whip this one up so we have it ready for when we need to prototype. We can put it in the shop, too.

Terminal blocks allow for quick wiring to power and each high current output, including one chunky block for the power input. The other 8 expander I/Os are exposed if you want buttons or simple LEDs. The breakouts have stemma QT for fast chaining/control over I2C.

Folks love our standard USB Type C breakout (https://www.adafruit.com/search?q=usb+type+c+breakout) - and we recently got a request to carry a 'sunken' Type C breakout - what's that mean? It looks like this! instead of sitting above the PCB the connector sits in the midline for a svelte look. this connector got our pick because it has four burly THM tabs to keep the connector from cracking at the contact pads.