Student's Electronics Development Lab

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Hazard
 
Posts: 196
Joined: Tue Oct 30, 2007 7:27 am

Student's Electronics Development Lab

Post by Hazard »

Hello!
Me and a friend felt inspired by Ladyada's site/biz and decided to start our own initiative. We are students in our 4th and 3rd year of Electronics Engineering, at Universidade do Minho in Portugal!
Our goal is to offer hardware and support to our course colegues , so they can experiment with what they learn in the various classes we have.
We started our initiative by designing a few development tools for AVR micros to be used in Microcontrollers2 class, then set up a webpage and a forum.
So far so good, we are in the publicezing part, our colleagues are visiting the site and we are eager to hear from them what they think.
Here is the webpage: http://sedl.pt.vu
It is written in portuguese, but you can run it through google translation, despite the hilarious result :D

Hazard
 
Posts: 196
Joined: Tue Oct 30, 2007 7:27 am

Post by Hazard »

We designed our first original kits!!
Butterfly Carrier:
It is a board where you can place a AVR butterfly, take wires to the breadboard, has 8 leds connected to a entire port, USB to serial converter, power supply by USB and a potentiometer conected to the voltage pin (you can use the original application to read the voltage)!

We also made a small breadboard power supply. for those who don't have dual power supplys and wish to learn about op-amps and stuff.

adafruit
 
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Post by adafruit »

great! you should post a link to it

Hazard
 
Posts: 196
Joined: Tue Oct 30, 2007 7:27 am

Post by Hazard »

Sorry, it is implied in the first post. Most of the site is in Portuguese, but you can still browse and look at the pictures.

Butterfly Carrier Announcement
Future Butterfly Carrier guide

BreadBoard Power Supply (guide in construction)

All the files are in the download section! We updated the butterfly carrier design because the original butterfly library part had small holes, also added minor changes but haven't published the new design.

LDS
 
Posts: 6
Joined: Sun Dec 23, 2007 11:12 am

Butterfly Carrier Board

Post by LDS »

Hi,

what do you think about this board?
Any opinions? Suggestions?


LDS

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westfw
 
Posts: 2008
Joined: Fri Apr 27, 2007 1:01 pm

Post by westfw »

Looks neat. Lack of silkscreen and soldermask makes it look less "professional" than it might; are those prototypes? I'm not sure how important a "professional appearance" really is. Functionality is probably more important. Being able to use USB for power (it does do that, right?) AND serial port simultaneously is really handy. The butterfly is annoyingly over-committed; which pins did you end up using to drive the LEDs? How available, and how well known, is the Butterfly in Portugal? I suspect that trying to make your initial sales Internationally is a complex and difficult thing; expect your initial customers to be mostly "local" (whatever that means in Europe these days.)

LDS
 
Posts: 6
Joined: Sun Dec 23, 2007 11:12 am

Butterfly Carrier Board

Post by LDS »

Hi,
Yes, these are prototypes. They're made here at the university. Since we are students we don't have financial resources to have all our boards made with "professional" quality. As we say here in Portugal "The eyes also eat.", what i mean is that the appearance counts, at least for our fellow students.
Yes, we do use the USB connection for power and data transmission.
If i'm not mistaken (i made this a while ago) it's PortB. The Butterfly is fairly accessible. A bit pricy, but still affordable.
Our objective is to provide tools for our colleagues to work, we never thought this as a international on-line store. But it would be fun to have our little corner like Ladyada has her.
To answer your final question, local in Europe means, all Europe. We can ship or receive from anywhere in Europe anything in 2 days, without customs interference :)

LDS
 
Posts: 6
Joined: Sun Dec 23, 2007 11:12 am

AVR Butterfly Carrier Board

Post by LDS »

Here you can watch a video of our board in action. In this video the butterfly is programmed using the AVR Dragon via JTAG, but it is also possible to do it using only the Butterfly default bootloader.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkVGY7JEAYs

Thank you

LDS

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