Hi Nigel, thanks for pointing out the Nano. If I were to put this thing into mass production and get price breaks on the components, I could definitely reduce the cost. The most expensive component right now would be the microcontroller which itself costs $3.74 ( £2.54 ) in small quantities (1-25).
Depending on how many people are interested I may be able to lower the cost even more, but again, at these small quantities certain components will be rather pricey.
I used Altium Designer 15 to design the board. I used to always use Eagle but ever since I acquired an Altium license through work I have used it exclusively. FAR more powerful!
The 18F1330 comes in an 18 pin DIP package, easily breadboardable and is 5V compatible. I'm not sure I see a market for your adapter. Perhaps a schematic might offer some insight.
If I was aiming at the student market I'd just make a PIC to Arduino sheild.
Rev 3 (this version) basically just shrinks Rev 2 to the size of a 28-pin DIP. Again, its main goal is to test code rather than to test hardware. It combines the ICSP and power supply circuitry onto a single board and lines up the pins in straight, neat rows to make it easier to use on a breadboard. If you used a standard through-hole DIP microcontroller, you would have wires all over the place connecting to the ICSP header and the voltage regulator. This way you don't.
The Arduino Nano does the same, presumably for the same reason, and interestingly the processor is rotated 45 degrees as well, presumably to make routing easier?. It also has the USB chip mounted under the board.
Stick a pic32mx440f256 or bigger on and I'll buy a chunk... I'm buying these in at the mo!
https://www.olimex.com/Products/Duino/PIC32/PIC32-PINGUINO-MICRO/open-source-hardware
Nice!
I would also add a provision for crystals. I always do on mine.
I made few of such boards over the years, some even home-made. Recently ordered a big chunk of them for my PIC testing - 14 of different ones covering all shapes and flavors of PICs.
They all use ZIF sokets. With my eyes it's hard to put a chip into a breadboard, but ZIF sockets are easy. For big PICs (e.g. 64 or 100 pin), of course, sockets are really expensive. The 100-pin socket together with the board order costs well over $200. I wonder if I would be better off soldering individual PICs on some sort of intermediary board.
I design them so that they're centered over a power strip with two pins going into the power strip to get power, and the side pins going into the very edge of the breadboard row (so that the pin takes only one hole and other 4 holes are available aside of the module). I actually cannot make them 700mil thin without sacrificing convenience, so they spread over some breadboard space fully covering one or even two rows, which makes them either 1500 or 2200mil wide. Surprisingly, I feel fine about such a waste of breadboard space.
Never thought about selling these things.
So, I did a quick search on tindie (Not tinder!), and not much came up for PIC micro stuff. I cant tell if theres no demand for us PIC users, or if theres a high demand. There are very little products, so its hard to tell.
DerStrom8 ^ This, Totally this. On one hand, you have a crappy system thats inefficient, on the other, you have a pletera of people becoming interested in electronics because of it, and as such, things like TFT's have libraries. Sooner or later these get ported over for us PIC users. Also, I have a lack of time to do porting myself, and I have been tempted to go to things like a chipkit. /jackingthread.
10 PCBs? Im guessing you must be ordering from dirty PCB. Why not go with OSHpark and sell the first 3 (or give them away for free)? Get some feedback from people who will use them.
On another note, a long time ago I made my own "dev" board for a 28 Pin PIC with just perf board and just brought out the ICSP pins to the front. Ive been wanting to replace it (I Use a 18F2410 as my dev pic).
I despise the Arduino, namely the IDE and the libraries. They are slow, bulky, and are horribly inaccurate. I wanted a small board that I could program using an IDE that's actually useful to an engineer (unlike the Arduino IDE) and easy to use for prototyping.
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