ULTIMA, a real successor of SDuino

My ULTIMA3,
https://www.tindie.com/products/micro...

has already gyro and pressure/temperature/humidity sensor, and now I quickly added magnetic field sensor. This demo showing "compass" mode and "atmosphere" sensing...

Source code is uploaded to:

https://github.com/kodera2t/ULTIMA_SAMPLE/blob/master/ULTIMA_all_in_one.ino

Have fun!

Now ULTIMA3 has

1. on-board Lipo charging circuit
2. on-board micro SD card slot
3. on-board full-color OLED display
4. on-board gyro sensor (MPU6050)
5. on-board temperature/pressure/humidity sensor BME280

The following movie shows ULTIMA3 (not yet released on tindie.com) quick demo, presenting temperature/pressure/humidity as a punishment of mistake on MAZE program !?

Nowadays, lots of chip has QFN or BGA shape, those are "impossible" to solder by soldering iron. Actually I know lots of personal engineer and hardware hacker has reflow oven and utilise them with solder paste stencil. Also in my case, I encounter this type of chip (gyro sensor and temp/pres/humi sensor) and found out soldering them is NOT so hard. Here I would introduce my own way.

First of all, we need to paste solder paste on the destination pattern. Common sense says we should mask between electrode but indeed, surface tension of melting paste clearly separate electrode each other. Of course too much paste will put additional electric connection between patterns and we need some experience how the amount is proper....

As same as PCB, in my experience, I put very small amount of paste on the electrodes of chips. Just on PCB sometimes bad connection so this is just to make it more sure.

For heating soldering paste, I use "heating gun", a kind of big blower for engineering purpose.

Lastly, putting hot air blow on PCB. The pressure of air flow easily blow out tiny chips so we need some care. This requires some experience. After certain amount of air flow, the color of soldering paste will change from gray to silver (glittering), carefully heat all of electrode and everything is done! (As we know, too much heat will break parts and burn PCB, some experience is required...)

This is the final shape of soldering by hot air. As we see, some solder ball are around chip and we need to remove them carefully (no need but for cosmetic). Also we need to check solder bridge (if we can see electrode). This case, the electrode of BME280 is completely below chip and we cannot see and check "solder bridge" by our eyes but I took this way more than 100 PCB and I have not met error.

Actual "live" soldering can be found in the following movie.. Have fun!

See how it works!

Spooky eyes on color OLED by gesture sensor. This "eye" image and basic codes are prepared by original author of SSD13XX library and I quickly modified to work with optical gesture sensor. The Arduino sketch (works for Zero Color2 and ULTIMA) of this sample is uploaded to

https://github.com/kodera2t/ULTIMA_SAMPLE/blob/master/ULTIMA_EYE2.ino

and you can get this board (ULTIMA) at

https://www.tindie.com/products/microwavemont/ultima-a-full-functioned-arm-based-board/

and gesture sensor can be found, for example,,,,

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12787

Have fun!

A maze game sample by ULTIMA and I2C acceleration sensor. The program sketch is uploaded to

https://github.com/kodera2t/ULTIMA_SAMPLE/blob/master/ULTIMA_MAZE2.ino , which works for ULTIMA or Zero Color2 or ULTRA Zero Color (ULTRA Zero needs I2C bus soldering)

, and you can buy ULTIMA at https://www.tindie.com/products/microwavemont/ultima-a-full-functioned-arm-based-board/

or Zero Color 2 at

https://www.tindie.com/products/microwavemont/zero-color-2/

ULTIMA is submitted for the sale at tindie.com. Now waiting for admin approval. Generally approval will be published on Mondays and stay tunemy tindie.com store!

ULTIMA with acceleration sensor with one tact switch enables very primitive graphic draw program. The drawing color can be switch just cursor touching to frame.

The corresponding Arduino sketch is uploaded to github and actual operation can be found in the following movie... Have fun!