Wednesday 17 July 2019

At the Margin

(Who knew that the Economics of Seinfeld was a thing? Given that it was the first link returned by Google, everyone but me I guess!)

The idea of "marginal cost" is usually in mind when I'm preparing a PCB order from Seeed Studio. That's because their product is cheap and high quality but shipping rates are high. This means that it's almost free to load up an order with small items which would not of themselves justify the total cost.

This post describes a couple of such items, which gave me practice (I'm learning KiCad) yet took no longer than a few hours to produce.

The first of these is a breakout board for the (pre-ESP8266 anyway) ubiquitous nRF24L01 radio module. Its main advantage is its low power, allowing projects using it to run off batteries. Its main disadvantage is its breadboard-hostile pinout. Enough said: see picture below.
nRF24L01 breakout
Sparkfun does something similar; however theirs is better, and more expensive! I kept mine pin-compatible though, because why not?

Next up is a breadboard-friendly development board for the attiny84. This had been on my maybe-list for a while but it was only when I discovered Spence Konde's awesome Arduino core for ATtiny that I decided to go for it. The presence of Optiboot sealed the deal for me: the pin header allows sketch upload via a standard FTDI dongle.

attiny84 devboard
Lastly, just to show that they both play nicely together, the pair wired up, and programmed with a sketch using my ATtiny port of the RF24 library (originally written by Maniacbug of course).
All together now!

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