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A project log for PIC-On-The-Go

PIC Microcontroller dev boards, in unusual cases

jarrettJarrett 04/08/2016 at 04:280 Comments

I haven't actually read or looked at or thought about literally any of the contents of this project since the last log.

So I don't know if I mentioned, but I've been pretty apathetic about this from the beginning. A big part of the reason is that I can't respin the board and send it off on a whim. My cheap boardhouse of choice, DirtyPCBs, groups things by 5cm^2 boards, or 10cm^2 boards, with nothing in between. The distance between the header pins of the Arduino are 53.3mm.

Yeah, that's just about the most annoying thing in the world, and it puts the cost of a board respin just above my impulse purchase threshold.

Also since I've posted this, Microchip has gotten the hint as a company, and two rad new devboards have come out.

So I'm totally repurposing this project for other, vaguely similar things I work on occasionally!

Here's the latest one:

(Obviously unpopulated there)

Yeah. It's a board that's the same size and shape as the flash drive I pulled apart.

I've got more information posted up here, but the TL;DR is:

It's awesome, it's a PIC dev kit with a $5 BOM (including PCBs!), a full port broken out, USB, and all of the hardware files up on GitHub. Oh, and some code that emulates a keyboard and starts typing.

Fork it and do something cool with it! I'll be getting a bunch made for myself, but I won't be writing any more USB code, tbh. I'm not into it, at this moment.

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