Sam Jacoby

My circuit board order came in — it’s always astonishing how tiny the things are, these boards are about the size of two postage stamps, side-by-side. The “barebones” option from Advanced Circuits is a pretty good deal too. These cost $8.90 apiece, which is pretty reasonable. I know that APC Circuits has really quick turn-around for boards with solder mask and such, but I didn’t need it. I’m mostly proud for remembering not to pour a groundplane, as it makes it a pain to solder.

I used a bunch of 0603 resistors to provide the loads on the capacitive pads (those rectangles along the top). Those suckers are small. What’s all the more astonishing, is that there is yet a smaller size, 0402, which is about the size of a grain of sand. And Brian was telling me that some special-purpose boards can have the passive elements like those baked right into the various layers.

I had to catch a flight out to LA—though it was delayed 2 hours—but I managed to throw together a board to bring with, so I could do some work on the plane (of course, I ended up not doing any). After puzzling for a minute why the FTDI programming only worked the first time after burning the Arduino bootloader, I realized that I hadn’t put in the auto-reset capacitor between the DTS pin of and the RST line. It works the first, because the bootloader itself holds the chip in reset (thanks, Dave).

Update

I soldered on the toothless alligator clips today (what gems! [Newark]) and drew up an aquatic sketch to have some examples to show folks for the workshop I’ll be doing.