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surfacemount

MultiBOB - A Breakout Board with Multiple Personalities

I have been moving away from THT to Surface Mount over the past year, once you learn how to solder them they are not that difficult to use and offer many advantages over THT including the range of components, price, availability and reduced PCB size. I still need to breadboard experimental circuits (or 'Version 0' of a prototype) and SMT parts are not overly friendly in that regard. I wound up making a set of DIP style breakouts for various SMT formats (SOIC, TSSOP, QFN, etc) but that still left the issue of discretes. Inspired by this project on Hackaday I designed a small multi-purpose break…

Using GreenPak Programmable Logic

In my last post I mentioned that the breakout boards I had designed for the the tiny GreenPak chips had arrived, turns out it was just in time as I discovered a need for them very quickly. A friend of mine needed a simple solution that would allow him to detect button presses through the microphone input of a mobile phone - the quick and dirty solution of simply putting a button and a resistor between ground and the microphone input worked in most cases but for some inputs there wasn't enough noise to generate a measurable change in audio level. I proposed using a small tone generator that wou…