Han SAOlo

This was the most popular simple add-on that I handed out and even before there were some people writing me that they'd like to have one. Before next year's Europe event, that has a high chance of happening again in Berlin, and before Congress, I'd like to make an update to this badge. 

The badge needs a place for a pin and a CR2032 battery, so it can be usd stand alone as well and I can gift it to friends unaware of SAO headers and pinouts of such! I can't find notes on the foot print I made for #K.I.T.T. - KNIGHT RIDER badge/brooch, but I have one kit with me and plenty of pins and battery cases at home still.

I've added two more memes to the design, plus some additional silkscreen drawings for the "bottom" part. I created an "IIC ready" logo, as I don't feel strong about adding any cool I2C features like @InstantArcade (Bob) added to his #Hack-Man SAO  

Someone on twitter made a joke about an AT-ATiny being used and I liked that, so I stole that :)

Just need to add hotglue to 30 badges and I'm ready for Supercon!

This box is special :) A week ago this box with 10 PCBs of my Han Solo simple add-on arrived - fully assembled- at my place! I only had to program them to make them work, everything else was sponsored, populated and soldered by JLCPCB! Seeing these blue boxes in the hand of my post person always make me very happy. Most of you are probably aware of JLCPCB, but fun-fact - aparentlly so are 5.4 million users!

The PCBs inside came in a pink bubble wrap burrito, nothing was loose or able to scratch the important soldermask of this project. I never had to complain about packaging with them and I'm always using the boxes for project storage and carrying them to the hackspace and back. 

And here they are. The back is populated with the ATTiny412, all resistors and capacitors, side glowing LEDs and two sockets, a JST-SH and a 2x3 header, as the regular IDC connector was too big for the design. JLCPCB offers a variety of colours that are great for pcbart, but in this case I was very pleased with the black PCB option already. 

If you mark your PCB with JLCJLCJLCJLC and select "order number (select position)", then they will put the order number where you want - which is very important for badgeart like here!

Here are the color options for the standard and advanced FR4 PCBs.

If you have never used them before, now is the time - they even have coupons at the moment, up to $80 when you sign up. But there's always a coupon for something, as they usually have some for assembly or a new thing they are trying. Especially when you do a small run for prototypes, it really comes in handy that their prices start at $2 for 5 PCBs - and the quality is amazing.

That's not all they're doing though, they also 3D print things and offer CNC services, worth to check out! I definitely want to try out their flex PCBs as well in the future.

After having a wonderful moment unpacking the PCBs, I still had to wait for the LEDs to be delivered. This weekend though, they finally arrived.

So I quickly soldered the LEDs very carefully and the Attiny202 onto the board with some capacitors. First realisation was, that the regular neopixel Arduino code is way too big. There's an example of a static tinymegacore library, that worked though.

The footprint of the LED I made myself, so naturally I forgot to check what the schematics symbole looked like. Here I mixed up two pins, which meant the LEDs had no chance of shining.

Secondly, I used the programming pin as the LED data pin, something I corrected in the second version. For testing the code I've added 4 regular WS2812B LEDs on a string instead, to see if the code would work on a different pin as expected. Not sure why the CH340E USB-C programmer wouldn't work for serialUPDI, but I still had an FTDI dongle somewhere and that worked just fine to program the attiny.

Recently I've been contacted by JLCPCB and they offered to sponser a small run of PCBs and I think this is a great opportunity for this boards second run. The Attiny202 seemed too busy with just the neopixels already, and to keep things open for I2C communication, I have replaced the Attiny202 chip with an Attiny412.

Fixing some labels, adding one more LED, Pullup resistors for I2C, some test points and a qwiic connector, I think I'm happy with the board design.

This is too big (>6cm tall) to fit the size constrains and uses a certain mouse franchise. Meme's without copyright infringement is hard.