So I look around Hackaday and see a huge number of excellent projects with nice colourful custom PCBs which as well as no doubt being the optimum electronic solution also gives an air of professionalism to the project and circuit.
Unfortunately, I am too lazy/stupid/tight to go down this route for what I fully expect to be a one off as I can't see a wide range of people wanting to do something as niche and specific as the aims of this project. My simple solution for circuit boards is to design them on breadboards and then transfer the proven design to an adafruit perma-proto board. These boards are at the right level of cost and ease of use for someone of my limited electronic capabilities.
Pictured above is the final circuit for this project, the main components are:- headers to accept a Wemos D1 Mini ESP8266 Board with my custom micropython build
- A P82B96P chip in the centre of the board to level shift the incoming 5V I2C signal from the NASA Marine wind unit to a 3.3v level for the ESP8266
- A Recom R-78E0.0-1.0 switching regulator to power the circuit from the 12v supply from the Nasa Marine wind unit
- A Molex connector at the bottom of the circuit to connect to the NASA repeater socket
- Two dip switches, one on the left allows the regulator to be disabled for when a USB lead is connected to the Wemos for testing/development purposes, and a dip switch on the right which when switched on pulls up a control pin and stops the program from running. This was introduced as it was difficult to break into a running program from the webrepl, although I believe that this may have been a bug which has now been resolved.
I have no doubt that the circuit could be better designed and implimented, but as a non expert in these areas I am more than happy with a functional design which works as intended.
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