ublox NINA-W102 minimal breakout

The design has been finalized and the first run of 120 pieces is now in production.

A project website has been created which contains all needed info to use it and can be found at http://rac.su/ninab

Thanks to Gonzalo, we have now a nice Arduino style pinout map ;-)

The old Duck Tape Approved has been replaced with another version as we did not get any reply about the licence of the original picture and if we are allowed to use it. While it is derivative work and not exactly the same, I did trace parts of a logo from a website and we asked the author but never got a reply, so better stick with an image which is under a CC licence that we can use.

I conducted the very first simple test, using the generic wifi scan examples from the ESP32 package in Arduino and choosing the board "u-blox NINA W10 Series (ESP32)"...

I did not find my other serial adapter which has the correct layout but this one works as well with some cables. Otherwise the programmer would stick with the snapfit pcb socket perfectly without soldering any headers/sockets and it does work quite well with just holding the dupont cables as the housings press it against each other like in a row connector.

First hand assembly of the prototype is done, now we can move on to start testing and developing firmware for it ;-)

Firs prototype did arrive from PCBWay and looks great so far.

The breadboard layout worked out as designed and only occupies 1 column on each side. The snapfit design (courtesy of an old SparkFun blog post I did read) for the headers seem to work very good as solder assistant but Gonzalo measured bad conductivity when not solder so might have to adapt it later and make the shift a little bigger). The Font has some small errors that need to be corrected for it to look nicer but for now we can conduct the first assembly by hand to test the functional parts of it. The sample from OSHPark is still on the way but it will be interesting to compare the print and pad quality of the two suppliers.

The NINA module is a tiny bit small and hand soldering it might be a bit challenging as I never did solder SMD parts so far and this entire build is my hello world in designing a board with EDA software from schematics to PCB layout and then go trough the process of actually manufacturing it as finished modules to be used in the MakeZurich hackathon which is coming up pretty soon.

After a couple of small review cycles, I have now a first version that has been ordered as a test batch from OSHPark and PCBWay to see and compare and test it out of course ;-)

Here are the renderings for the breakout in rev.0.4 which is also pushed to github

And gonzalo made new design mocks of our main use case for this module which look pretty cool

the module in the bottom is the NINA breakout, all PIN's except the ones we have in use by the badge motherboard are exposed to the sides.

After adding some more ground vias, fixing problematic traces and vias and adding more pin labels, this is likely the revision which I send to OSHPark next week if there are no review comments.

CTS from the serial header is connected to the SYS_BOOT pin (for that the ⇨BOOT behind it on the silk) but on the sides (J1 and J2) all PINs of the NINA-W102 module are exposed and there the CTS label points to the actual UART_CTS pin.

After a design decision made on another project (https://hackaday.io/project/152901-iot-conference-badge), this board will have not just a life as breadboard prototyping breakout but will be used as a module with stackable shields on a conference badge. This gives the attendees the possibility to just detach that part from the header (not soldered) and use it for their projects.

This is a short draft from @Gonzalo Casas  of how this badge looks like from the dimensions, the thing on the top is a Waveshare 2.13" EPD module.

Attached images of the PCB rev.3 board after having a couple of design iterations and got feedback from reviewers

Schematics has been created with the help of the datasheet and the system integration handbook of the NINA module.

Current version is rev.0.4 which has incorporated some feedback I got from engineers reviewing my design.