#custompcb

BIG BIG rainbows on "Sparkle motion" WLED driver board 🌈💡

We got our WLED-friend PCBs

https://blog.adafruit.com/2024/12/02/leftovers-layout-wled-board-revision-a-completed/

and are testing it with various LED grids. First, we tried out a 16x16 NeoPixel grid that runs on 5V. Since that worked well, we're now onto a much bigger 60 x 60 grid - that's 3,600 LEDs! These are some NeoPixel pebble

netting samples we're also testing at the same time; each one has 20 x 60 pixels and uses 12V power, so it's a good test of the DC pass-through for higher voltages. Since WLED has a limit of 2000 pixels per output, this demo uses the three output ports that are then 'merged' together in memory to make a single large grid. We have more to test soon: the onboard IR receiver, USB PD, I2S microphone, extra I/O pins, and I2C, so watch for those videos as they come together. Coming soon -

Festival of Lights… A 'USB Stick' Sparkle Motion WLED driver ✨💡🔌🌟

To wrap up this year, we're doing 8 days (maybe!) of light-filled designs. We started with the Sparkle Motion Mini

which can drive thousands of shimmering RGB LEDs. Next, we were going through some of our NeoPixel samples today and found some "LED Christmas light kit" with star LEDs, its basically these stars

with a little USB plug that has IR, a crummy mic, a tactile switch to cycle modes manually, and a tiny microcontroller that turns the LED selections to different patterns - kinda like this:

The idea is cute - but the implementation could be improved with a lil sparkle motion

! we made a PCB that would fit into the same plastic enclosure but with an ESP32 instead. it's got an IR receiver, ICS-43434 I2S digital microphone

https://www.digikey.com/short/mmv3tthz

Fruit Jam RP2350B credit-card mini computer with all the fixin's 🍓🍇💾

We were catching up on a recent Hackaday hackchat with Eben Upton (https://hackaday.io/event/202122-raspberry-pi-hack-chat-with-eben-upton) and learned some fun facts: such as the DVI hack for the RP2040 was inspired by a device called the IchigoJam (https://www.hackster.io/news/ichigojam-combines-strawberry-and-raspberry-to-deliver-a-raspberry-pi-pico-powered-educational-micro-66aa5d2f6eec). We remember reading about this back when it was an LPC1114, now it uses an RP2040. Well, we're wrapping up the Metro RP2350 (https://www.adafruit.com/product/6003), and lately, we've been joking around that with DVI output and USB Host support via bit-banged PIO, you could sorta build a little stand-alone computer. Well, one pear-green-tea-fueled-afternoon later we tried our hand at designing a 'credit card sized' computer - that's 3.375" x 2.125", about the same size as a business card (https://hackaday.com/2024/05/07/the-2024-business-card-challenge-starts-now/) and turns out there's even a standard named for it: ISO/IEC 7810 ID-1 (https://www.iso.org/standard/70483.html).

Anyhow, with the extra pins of the QFN-80 RP2350B, we're able to jam a ridonkulous amount of hardware into this shape: RP2350B dual 150MHz Cortex M33 w/ PicoProbe debug port, 16 MB Flash + 8 MB PSRAM, USB type C for bootloading/USB client, Micro SD card with SPI or SDIO, DVI output on the HSTX port, I2S stereo headphone + mono speaker via the TLV320DAC3100 (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/texas-instruments/tlv320dac3100irhbt/2353656), 2-port USB type A hub for both keyboard and mouse or game controllers, chunky on-off switch, Stemma QT I2C + Stemma classic JST 3-pin, EYESPI for TFT displays, 5x NeoPixels, 3x tactile switches, and a 16-pin socket header with 10 A/D GPIO + 5V/3V/GND power pins. The PSRAM will help when we want to do things like run emulations that we need to store in fast RAM access, and it will also let us use the main SRAM as the DVI video buffer.

TPS65131 split boost converter revision ✅🔧

Prototype build time lapse! Adafruit ENS160 MOX Gas Sensor - Sciosense CCS811 Upgrade - STEMMA QT / Qwiic 🛠️🌬️📈

The ENS160 Gas Sensor is an excellent air quality sensor from ScioSense, replacing the discontinued CCS811, with new driver code. This sensor incorporates a microcontroller and MOX sensor to provide detailed air quality readings via an I2C interface, but calibration against known sources is required for precision. The sensor, on a custom PCB in the STEMMA QT form factor for easy interfacing, allows for humidity and temperature compensation and supports both 3.3V and 5V systems.

In stock and shipping now.

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