Hello World,
I’ve been tinkering with electronics since childhood and am looking to learn a bit more detail. My projects generally center around holiday decoration such as Halloween. I’m looking to get into PCB design and prototyping to enhance this hobby!
Ultimately I’d like to share some of my projects in a more polished fashion that can be reproduced reliably 
Thanks,
Mark
Finished Start Here!
Logistics last night and Mindset + Resources this morning before work
Welcome Mark, there is never a shortage of stuff to learn and do around here
This is a build log entry for a 10MHz frequency reference
This sort of thing is fairly well documented in other places, but I wanted to use this as a way to learn. Most of my equipment has 10MHz frequency external reference capability and, although I don’t really need it today, I’d like to learn more about the technology in general how it’s used in instruments.
eBay often has 10MHz frequency references as components pulled out of telecom or similar equipment. After some quick searching I found that Rubidium is listed as one of the most stable and common references available. I bought an Efratom Rb 10MHz oscillator and this build log is to track efforts associated with getting it working.
I couldn’t find much direct correlation between the device, its labels, and documentation. The FRS manual and pinouts accurately describe the device and its behavior, so I’m assuming I’ve got this correct so far 
The connector that came with it was a pin type rather than solder cup. The heat from the soldering appeared to have weakened the pins resulting in some breakage on pin 1, causing issues with my testing.
Materials so far
Efratom FRS Manual
Efratom FRS Pinouts
My unit’s label
Screenshot of waveform (square, sort of)
After reading through the documentation it looks like pins 1, 4, and 7 are not for customer use and there is some intersting items in the documentation. I connected them to my DAQ and ran a 60-minute capture from power-on to see what happened.
The documentation says that at power on the unit provides 10MHz via a crystal for about 4-minutes until the Rb lamp heats up. After the Rb lamp is heated it’ll switch to Rb instead of crystal. This can be monitored by looking at the “Lock” pin 1 voltage; ~5V (mean is 5.1) is crystal and ~0V is Rb.
Check out the chart below, data captured with U2351A via Benchvue, exported to Excel for charting, annotations done in PowerPoint
It’s very clear on my Siglent SDG 2042X counter function that the crystal is quite accurate and fairly stable, whereas the Rb is dead-on 10MHz and extremely stable.
Power draw is >1250mA while crystal is running and lamp is warming, drops down to 300-400mA after Rb locks. I was using Eevblog’s uCurrent for this with a 3V battery. I’ve since soldered in an external battery connector and will use a 5V source from now on
Next steps:
Finished the first couple of videos for Shine on. I created my first board and ordered a few along with parts! Learned a lesson here about grabbing the right sized part; accidentally chose a larger LED and couldn’t find any on Digi-key. Ooops! Fixed the part to 1206, updated the nets, updated the pcb, and ordered three of those… now to wait on shipping!
First month has already paid for itself for sure. I’ve been wanting to create a PCB myself for ages but just found it too daunting 
Awesome, glad to hear you got a board out! You’ll love the feeling of holding it in your hand, I still marvel when something I designed on a screen becomes real in my hand. Plus it all gets easier the more you do it.
Sweet, the boards have arrived and I got them built
Check out how much brighter the 4520 LEDs units are on the goof-up board, wow!
I used a Dremel 7700 with the 240 grit sanding band to clean up the pointy bits on the sides and the corners.
A big thank you to @ChrisGammell and the Shine-on project for getting me my first PCB build! I’m excited to move through this and get some of those projects I’ve had in mind made into reality. Marvel is the right word for sure 
Congratulations Mark!
Getting to Blinky 4.0 really comes off the rails at “Creating the Layout” – the latest version of KiCad is wildly different in appearance and behavior
I may have to re-install 4.x if I can and start over, or at least figure out how to have it do the translucence 
=== EDIT ===
Issue resolved by virtue of RTFM, they moved this functionality to its own button setup on the left menu bar. This new methology is tons better but I’d like to see one for transparency in addition to the new outline mode
I found in 5, that you can double click the colour icon in against any particular layer and you can change the colour and its opacity.
Oh wow, that’s awesome! If you right-click on the that same block you get layers options as well. This is exactly why I’m here. These programs can be daunting if you’re new to this and learning on your own.
Thank you!
Just completed GTB, afterwards I made a modification to include a few test points and a variable resistor. Boards came in and got one soldered up. It all went well except my SMD skills need some work, especially on that 555’s SOIC-8 footprint!
Here’s a close-up of the first one I did. There’s a bodge wire on pin 1 so that I could probe around a bit with my multimeter. R2 is doing a bit of drifting there, those are style points and totally intentional
…
Revised board
I actually skipped ahead a bit and watched the reflow video, neat stuff. I got a T-962 off eBay for pretty cheap. I’ve been watching videos on fixing the various issues and will check it out along with the stencil thing for doing a few of these
Rustic can also be fashionable
Nice work.
Bought a handful of “ATMEGA328 U” chips and “ATMEGA328P PU” chips to test shrinking footprint and cost of a few Arduino-powered projects. I found a few things challenging, but some great resources.
Great post on the overall effort
I didn’t have any 22uF caps but I did have a couple of 20uF and they work fine
Burning a bootloader on the non-PU chips (works great on PC and Mac)
Open avrdude.conf and under the atmega 328 section find " signature = 0x1e 0x95 0x0F; " and change the 0F to 14
Save the file and restart the arduino ide, you should now be able to bootload your atmega328-pu chips
I haven’t posted in a while because I’m a little stuck. This Teensy plugin for Arduino is a pain! It’s certainly left me with no interest in doing Teensy related development. I may have to skip that section of CE altogether and hope there’s not much more of it.
I want to learn electronics, not troubleshoot poorly written plugins. It’s 2019, using an IDE plugin shouldn’t include “disable your antivirus”
Is there an Arduino library or other alternative to using the Teensyduino add-on?
I hadn’t heard about that kind of problem in the past, but that must be very frustrating!
You’re of course free to skip a section, but if we can help troubleshoot, we’re here to help.
I am sorry that you have hit a wall. An alternative could be PlaformIO. It was featured in episode 274 of Embedded.FM. I have not checked this out to any great extent except for the Adafruit Feather.
What was the specific problem?
I’ll check that out, thanks! It would freeze during the install process and actually corrupt the Arduino IDE install to where it wouldn’t compile and upload properly. I’m running Windows 10 and Arduino 1.8.8
I just bought a cheap laptop (refurb Lenovo Thinkpad T460S) that I’ll throw Ubuntu on when that arrives and see how it compares. Having a machine that’s fully electrically isolated (i.e. using battery power) is probably a good idea anyway as I learn more about the power stuff. I’ve seen Chris use Ubuntu with Kicad in a few videos and have been meaning to check it out.
Moving from AVR to ARM is interesting and something I’ll want to have a look at eventually. The Teensy seems like as good of a place to start as any really. In the meantime, I’ve been dying to learn to do more object-oriented stuff with the ATMega328 as well as learn to manipulate DC voltage without using expensive off-the-shelf converters
I do have to say that this courseware has taken me from a RadioShack level tinkerer to someone who is quite comfortable designing PCBs in no time!
I’ve designed my own Arduino clone and will post the full files and stuff after the PCBs come in and I can test. It all works on the breadboard, so hopefully I didn’t goof it up in the software!
That is really odd behaviour of freezing and especially corrupting the IDE. The only issue I have had is that the automatic reboot fails and the Aruino UI gives an error. I then only have to press the reset on the Teensy and all is good. That actually happens quite often.
Sounds like there is some odd clash with some other driver or software. Hopefully the new machine will be bettter.
No dice, everything did install and launches properly, however, it now shows a JAVA error in Arduino IDE and another error when trying to upload to the Teensy.
I think I’m just going to build an Arduino Micro version of the CE Header and run through the Teensy stuff and make substitutions as necessary. I really can’t be bothered to troubleshoot someone’s janky plugin
