Chris M.

I'm working on a small filtering board to filter out high frequency noise from an RC servo power and signal. It's a simple 2-layer board with large traces and large (>= 0603) parts. That means it's within the capabilities of pretty much all online quick turn board fabs. Wrapped the design last night, time to order the first set of prototype boards. A few of my favorite quick turn board fabs are  jlcpcb and OSHPark . These will be hand assembled, otherwise I'd probably use jlcpcb as they'll assemble boards and have a ton of passives in their catalog of available parts. All of my ECAD work is done with KiCAD so you can imagine my surprise when I spotted this mention on the OSHPark site of " drag and drop your KiCAD files "?!?! Looking at their help page it turns out OSHPark will directly accept a KiCAD .kicad_pcb file, no pre-processing necessary. I'm not sure how long OSH has had this support, maybe its been a while and I just noticed it, but its a ...

As part of an on-going discussion on the KiCAD devleopers mailing list about library crowdsourcing, I wanted to put together more detail about the issue. I've been using KiCAD for a handful of months and was unaware of some of the organizations, such as CircuitHub  and KiCadCloud , that have been working to improve the situation until this discussion. Background PCB development flow A typical circuit board development process in KiCAD looks something like: Schematic (eeschema) Design a circuit Locate components (or create the component symbols ) Add components to the schematic Connect components on a schematic using the component symbol Map component to footprint (cvpcb) Choose the specific footprint for each component in the schematic (or create the necessary footprints ) Layout (pcbnew) Place components Route the signals on the board The problem During schematic step #2 and the component mapping process, the highlighted steps above, any componen...

Earlier this year I purchased a Toyota Plug-in-Prius . The car comes with a slow charger module that is powered through a standard 120v 15amp outlet. This kind of outlet can deliver something around 1kw of energy. For the 4.4kw battery pack in the PiP , it takes about 3 hours to charge the pack from its empty state. Empty for the PiP isn't actually a zero charge level, the battery is kept within a 15% to 85% State-of-charge(SOC) to prolong its life. Frequently I was finding that I didn't have enough time to charge the pack before leaving on another trip. One option was the $1500 or so to purchase a 240v charger and have someone install it. A quick search on the web turned up the OpenEVSE project , a project to build a evse charger. I started to read about the evse project and got interested in building one. I did want to have some kind of network support so I could control and monitor charging, schedule it better than the car could and otherwise expand upon what the proj...