Helpful hobbyist products.What would you like?

[cyb0rg777]

I have been wandering around the net looking for some things that would make our hobby easier.I have a couple of things that are maybe already out that I can't find information on.

1.USB to standard port converter chips.I want a chip that will convert USB to USART and/or SPP(parallel port).I think they should have standard drivers that allows the software to register them as either a serial or parallel port.I have found a couple chips but 48 pins is overkill for a simple standard application.

2.Conductive ink and/or glue. Life would be so much easier if you could use SMT by simply glueing the parts in place and drawing the traces by hand.I read the wikipedia article on conductive ink and it says you can draw traces on paper.Maybe you could print conductive ink and glue the pieces. I guess if you messed up you would just rip your pieces off and start over.I have found a pen from radioshack that writes conductive ink but not much info.

Where is this stuff and if we have it why are we not using it? Please add your own ideas if you want something that is not on the market or you can't find.

 

[HarveyH42]

From what I understand about conductive inks and glue, they aren't great for repair jobs, expensive to do complete projects. There is resistance, don't tolerate heat well, nor handle much current. Not sure if there others, but the only conductive glue I know is an epoxy, which wouldn't be fun to remove.

But with all that said, it has been done. Think I saw it on Hack-a-day.com or Makemagazine. The point is that when you construct a project, you hope it will last for a while, at least until you need parts for your next, better project...

 

[Sceadwian]

The problem is there's not a big market in the IC industry for generic serial to USB converters in small dip packages, they're better off making more generic fully functional chips and let people design simple modules for individual applications. If you need a really simple USB to serial converter, simply go buy one, you can buy USB to serial or USB to parallel cables for 10-20 bucks at any electronics store. FTDI sells a nice line of relativly small package USB data converters.

I've used silver filled conductive epoxy before on a small project which required a small wire to be attached to a metal block. The stuff is ungodly expensive, has a short shelf life and is severely limited compared to a real metal link. I think I ended up spending 25 bucks on the epoxy and only ended up using a pea sized amount of it before it seperated and went bad.

 

[cyb0rg777]

The conversion chips would be very helpful .I found some infrared transceiver chips the other day that use usart .Many chips use usart and I don't see why a simple usb conversion chip would not be useful.

I would much rather have the conductive ink though.Conductive inks available at the moment may not be very useful but much better ones are beong developed.Surface mount has been biggest hurdle for me in building projects. I have never used surface mount parts.I'm no good at making circuit boards and you can't build prototypes with surface mount parts. I can't wait for this stuff.

Noone else can think of ideas to help hobbyist? I guess I'm no good at making topics. :-(

 

[evandude]

And on top of the issues of price and shelf life, with conductive ink you also need to worry about it cracking. If you put it on a piece of paper, one flex of the paper and all the ink would crack and separate. Even on a PCB, you could get a little flexing and once is all it would take.

I would much rather have the conductive ink though.Conductive inks available at the moment may not be very useful but much better ones are beong developed.Surface mount has been biggest hurdle for me in building projects. I have never used surface mount parts.I'm no good at making circuit boards and you can't build prototypes with surface mount parts. I can't wait for this stuff.

I build stuff all the time with surface mount parts. not on a breadboard obviously, but I make my own PCB's when needed and it really doesn't take that long. If you want to prototype things real easily, just don't use surface-mount parts, or learn to make PCB's. You seem to think that the only reason conductive ink isn't common is that the technology isn't there yet... when in reality it's not there because it's really not practical. for printed circuits you need low-resistance traces that won't crack or fall apart. Even good conductive inks can't compare to the resistance or durability of copper traces. Even if they come up with some super-flexible super-low-resistance conductive ink, it is pretty much guaranteed to cost a fortune... and it's not even really something worth developing because of how easy it is to make real PCB's instead. My homemade PCB's end up costing me probably less than a dollar most of the time. Using a conductive ink pen that costs $20+ and only lasts a short while is not only way more expensive, but by the time you finish drawing in all your traces by hand and fixing mistakes and all that, you'll end up with a big sloppy piece of crap that will stop working if you flex it or drop it or look at it sideways, and in not that much more time you could have made a durable PCB. Sure, if someone came out with a nice, fine-tip conductive ink pen that only cost a couple dollars, had ink that was easy to draw with and was flexible and durable and had extremely good conductivity... then I'm sure we'd all use them. But even the crappy ones available currently are still expensive, are you expecting them to significantly improve the ink while at the same time making them cheaper?

In addition, your aversion to the USB USART chips seems to be a bit odd as well. If you want to run USB straight to the board, use the conversion chips. Sure, they're surface mount with a lot of pins, but you don't need to use all the pins and they're small anyway, so who cares? If you want simple, buy a usb-serial converter cable and run a serial cable to the board from there.

 

[Sceadwian]

I've never done it myself, but anyone I've read that's tried it says that toaster oven reflowing is a piece of cake after a couple practice boards. Hand soldering isn't that difficult either if you have a little extra flux.

 

[cyb0rg777]

I am no good at making topics.I wanted a brainstorm and I get a debate.
I have spent hours searching the web on the subject of the ink and even the industry has great plans for conductive inks such as electronics printed newspapers (T-ink).Hewlet packard has a new process to print multilayer circuitboards with an inkjet printer. You must work in the industry Evandude because having both dip chips for prototyping and smd chips for building boards is quite an inventory.I have a radioshack pcb kit in my cabinet somewhere but I only tried a few boards.In both cases the traces came out "fugly" .Some of them where not useable.
The chip makes sense to me. A big USB to serial converter lowers the coolness factor. The chips would most likely be available only as smd anyway so I can't use them.The ink and the chip are sort of dream "what if" items.
Lets just agree the ink is impossible and the chips are uneccesary so I can ask for other peoples brilliant ideas.

 

[evandude]

You must work in the industry Evandude because having both dip chips for prototyping and smd chips for building boards is quite an inventory.

no, I've just been a hobbyist for many years and the parts build up. I'm sure everyone here who's been doing this for very long has an impressive parts bin as well. I also try deliberately to keep the SMD versions of many common parts on hand for several reasons: A) they're usually cheaper, B) they're smaller, thus making final boards smaller, C) they're easier to store, I can fit thousands of each part in tiny plastic flip-top containers, and D) they're faster and easier to solder.

I have a radioshack pcb kit in my cabinet somewhere but I only tried a few boards.In both cases the traces came out "fugly" .Some of them where not useable.

Well yes, if you rely on a rat shack kit to make your PCB's, they are going to come out pretty bad. PCB fabrication is NOT that hard and can give you very good results quite easily if you use the right methods. Toner transfer or UV exposure both make good homemade boards and aren't ridiculously complicated. Drawing the traces with a permanent marker or using the rub-on traces (whatever radio shack has you do) is never going to be as good.
This is a board I made with toner transfer:
**broken link removed**
and I can fabricate a board in an hour or two once it's designed, which is enough that I can still do an entire project in an afternoon if I feel so inclined.

The chip makes sense to me. A big USB to serial converter lowers the coolness factor.

Sure, I can see that it would be handy if they had lower pin count, since most people won't be using most of the features. On the other hand, once you actually do etch PCB's for SMD chips, it's not any harder to etch a board for a chip with 48 pins than it is to etch one with fewer pins, and for those that don't etch PCBs, there's not much reason that you can't just use serial directly. If you're not making PCB's, and just using it for breadboard prototyping, why do you care so much whether you run a serial cable to the board or a USB cable?