Tag: kicad

Universal PCIe, AGP, PCI, ISA card storage board (#P43)

Looks like I haven’t tagged any post as “project” for over a year now…time to release some open hardware

I don’t really store much computer hardware – most components are either in use (at least occasionally), waiting to be sold (eBay and the like), or waiting to change hands the next time I visit family. Of course there’s floppy drives somewhere, or good old memories (ha), but it’s not like I have a collection of each and every Socket A motherboard or something crazy. There is, however, two boxes (Really Useful Boxes to be precise, the 9 liter type that I use for lots of things since they fit a specific cupboard nicely) of extension cards. […]

16th July 2023 17th July 2023 By Bzzz In No Comment

RIP Cadsoft/Autodesk Eagle (#R20)

Oh well, looks like we got another piece of software to mourn for…good ol’ Eagle is no more!

Autodesk announced in a recent blog post:

Effective June 7, 2026, Autodesk will no longer sell or support EAGLE. Moving forward, we will continue to invest our energy in Fusion 360 Electronics.

(Note that it says 2026: That’s the end of the support. However, nobody sane will buy into that package from now on and switch again with all their projects in less than three years…)

Sure, the announcement itself was a surprise, but the path was clear once Autodesk tried squeezing out money. […]

11th June 2023 11th June 2023 By Bzzz In No Comment

Convenient IBM x3650 server PSU power distribution board (#P35)

On the occasion of selling the second PSU from the long dismantled IBM x3650M1 machine (part of the stack shown in #P23), a direct result of eBay getting greedy and increasing their commission from 10% of the item price to 11% including postage (WTF?) plus 35 cents per item, I need to publish this real quick. I still do have access to powerful 12V supplies that can operate my lightbox setup to take photos of the things are usually operating the lightbox, but it would be pretty inconvenient to do so ;)

So here’s another piece of Open Hardware – a custom PSU board for said IBM power supply. […]

21st March 2021 22nd February 2022 By Bzzz In 4 Comments

CR2025/CR2032 battery dummy for power consumption tests and a hungry Supermicro board (#P21)

This bugged me for quite some time now: Ever since a very nice dumpster revealed a stripped Supermicro server chassis including a Supermicro X8DTL board (Dual-1366) to me, the BIOS battery of that system seemed to be empty all the time. You see, I use this machine as an offline backup, so once every couple of months I fire it up, transfer my data, and unplug it from power and ethernet. And almost always it doesn’t start right up because the CMOS data is gone. Ideally it should be a headless unit, so that’s highly inconvenient.

I finally got around to test this – the fix will be another project for some day in the future. […]

8th March 2020 15th February 2020 By Bzzz In 2 Comments

ESP8266-DHT22-SR501 kitchen lights thingamabob PCB (#P7F1)

Alright, software aside, back to hardware…

The ESP module shown in #P7 slowly gathers dust in my kitchen, which is tolerable for a few weeks, but that’s not the solution I want long-term. Also, it’s on a separate power brick, meaning there are two microcontrollers running in my kitchen for doing fancy light switches and some air quality logging for twice the standby current. Nope, has to go, needs to be consolidated into one unit.

So a while back I designed this PCB and ordered it (once again) at OSH Park, together with some teeny-tiny DIP adapters that cost next to nothing. […]

21st October 2018 21st October 2018 By Bzzz In 1 Comment

A beefy electronic load (#P4F1)

Well, that was a long week…actually, it was a fortnight ;)

Here we go!

(the alignment of images really sucks when placed near the header of the post – thanks WordPress!)

So this puppy was manufactured by my new friends over at OSH Park (ordinary order, no extras) and I think I hit the express jackpot. I registered on June 8th and submitted my files – three hours later (1 AM my time on Friday) I already got notice of the panel assignment. Maybe the small size of 54mm x 31mm (2.1″ by 1.2″ for the Yankees out there) just made a perfect fit on the remaining board size and they sent it straight to production ;) As OSH Park charges 5 dollars per square inch of board area (for three units!), […]

13th August 2017 19th August 2017 By Bzzz In 2 Comments