You’ll wanna pull up a really comfy chair before you dive into this one, but have you ever found yourself digging through Eagle’s 317,424 different canned footprints, hoping one is kinda, sorta, almost, maybe good enough for that new sensor you found on Digikey?  Shamelessly dig and despair no more!  … Our new mammoth guide on creating manufacturable footprints in Eagle is here to ween you off that nasty canned footprint habit, and get you firmly on the road to non-dependency!

Featured Adafruit Products

ADS1115 16-Bit ADC – 4 Channel with Programmable Gain Amplifier – For microcontrollers without an analog-to-digital converter or when you want a higher-precision ADC, the ADS1115 provides 16-bit precision at 860 samples/second over I2C. The chip can be configured as 4 single-ended input channels, or two differential channels. As a nice bonus, it even includes a programmable gain amplifier, up to x16, to help boost up smaller single/differential signals to the full range. We like this ADC because it can run from 2V to 5V power/logic, can measure a large range of signals and its super easy to use. It is a great general purpose 16 bit converter. (read more)

Behind the Scenes with the SAMSUNG TECHWIN SMT SM482

Featured Adafruit Products

Adafruit 16-Channel 12-bit PWM/Servo Driver – I2C interface – PCA9685 – You want to make a cool robot, maybe a hexapod walker, or maybe just a piece of art with a lot of moving parts. Or maybe you want to drive a lot of LEDs with precise PWM output. Then you realize that your microcontroller has a limited number of PWM outputs! What now? You could give up OR you could just get this handy PWM and Servo driver breakout. (read more)

ch00ftech has been on a roll lately with their blog posts documenting the process of building their new QR Clock.  In the latest blog post, ch00f talks about the process of having circuit boards fabricated and assembled by a third party.

The original prototype took about an hour and a half to assemble, and since I don’t feel like quitting my day job to take up a career in burning my fingers, I decided it might be a good idea to look at some other options for assembly.

This post outlines my experiences of ordering PCBs pre-assembled.  I decided to go into a lot of detail with this post because while the ordering process was fairly straight forward, there were some slightly confusing parts to it, and if there’s one thing you don’t want to be when you’re dropping a few hundred/thousand dollars on PCBs, it’s unsure.  I figure this will be a rich resource for anyone planning on placing a similar order.

Manufacturing Flora NeoPixels on our new pick and place machine!

Taking its name from where it has been designed and made, the ‘são paulo collection’ by Studio Swine employs waste materials found in brazil’s largest city, transforming it into design objects. known as the ‘aluminium capital’ because it collects and recycles more cans than anywhere else in the world, the UK and brazil-based duo of azusa murakami and alexander groves have harnessed the potential of the scrap metal material surplus through means of sandcasting to create the legs of their ‘cactus coffee table’, as well as the abstracted palm pattern seen in their ‘lounge chair’.

dry run #manyfacturing vine.co/v/bFd1IDuwiKu

— adafruit industries (@adafruit) April 15, 2013

Dry run of one of our boards on the new Samsung pick and place.

Adafruit’s new pick and place machine has arrived! The Samsung Techwin SMT SM482, clocking in at over 28,000 cph. Samsung here is training our team for the week, we’ll be posting up photos for our weekly feature #manufacturing and celebrating “Made in NY”. According to Samsung we are the only company in Manhattan with this pick and place machine!

For my experiments lighting up SMT LEDs on the transparent material ITO, I first had to sort my LEDs by color, since I had a pile of assorted LEDs discarded by the pick and place machine. I used a business card, some copper tape, and a coincell battery + holder to make this tester jig!

photo by Simon Berry

Simon Berry is piggybacking on Coca-Cola’s distribution system to bring life-saving medicine to the places that need it most.

You can buy a Coke pretty much anywhere on Earth. Thanks to a vast network of local suppliers, Coca-Cola has almost completely solved distribution, getting its product into every nook and cranny where commerce reaches. There are places in the world where it’s easier to get a Coke than clean water. In the 1980s, Berry was an aid worker in Zambia, and when he looked at Coke’s success, he saw an opportunity.

“Child mortality was very high and the second-biggest killer was diarrhea, which is simple to prevent,” he says. The standard treatment is oral rehydration solution, or ORS, which is essentially salt, sugar and water. “I had the idea of transporting ORS through the Coca-Cola system.”

Essentially, Berry piggybacked on a massive corporate infrastructure to deliver simple medical treatment to regions that normal would receive none. For more reading, click here.

Thanks to hacker/maker Drew Fustini from Pumping Station: One for this great tip from SXSW this year:

Jeff McAlvay is showing off an Open Source Hardware Pick and Place machine at SXSW that he and other Pumping Station: One members have built. It uses a Raspberry Pi for computer vision and node.js web interface. He was interviewed by Slashdot yesterday!

I find this project really exciting, especially after Ladyada spent time investigating a tremendous range of Pick and Place machines out west a few weeks ago.

From Slashdot TV:

SXSW Create is one of a handful of sub-shows at SXSW which don’t require an expensive badge — it’s maker-oriented and small, and a few blocks from the slicker parts of the convention. (The local ATX Hackerspace was there showing off robots and giving out soldering lessons and blinkies, without a single corporate pitch.) Under the same tent, I met with Jeff McAlvay, creator of Board Forge, which Jeff hopes will make small-run circuit board creation as easy and accessible as small-scale 3-D printing has become in the last few years. (“Think MakerBot for electronics.”) The prototype hardware McAlvay had on hand looks — in fact, is a 3-D printer, albeit one lower-slung than the ones that make plastic doo-dads. That’s because the Board Forge’s specialized task of assembling circuit boards requires only limited vertical movement. It’s using the open-source OpenCV computer vision software and a tiny camera mounted on a movable head to accomplish the specialized task of selecting and placing components onto the boards. The tiny electronic components are lined up in strips on one side of the device, where that smart head can grab them for placement. The brains of the operation include an Arduino-family processor for basic controls, and a Raspberry Pi for the higher-level functions like computer vision. The projected cost for one of these machines — about $2000 — should put instant-gratification machine-aided circuit creation in reach of schools and serious hobbyists, but there’s plenty of work before it’s set for sale to the public; look for a Kickstarter project in the next few months.

Read more.

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro” ? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi. But wait, there’s more! Try our new Raspberry Pi WebIDE! The easiest way to learn programming on a Raspberry Pi.

We now have Raspberry Pi Model B with 512MB RAM in stock and shipping now!

Several of us here at Adafruit post quick phone pics of what we’re working on throughout the day to Instagram, so here are a few that we thought you’d like! Above is my pic of Collin during our LED Ampli-Tie photoshoot.

Reflow oven by Baken (read more about our new reflow oven)

James’ LED panels for Ra Ra Riot’s concert tour (more info)

Programming chips by Julian

Pallet of plushies by Tom

Scratch badges by Risa

For those of you who have been following along for the past two weeks, here’s the third part of Fran’s “Make Your own Printed Circuit Boards” series, focusing on drilling!

“Ask Fran” from Fran Blanche:

This is the third of my 3-part vlog mini-series on high quality PCB manufacturing. In these vlogs I will show the specialized tools and equipment that you will need to make your own high quality PCB’s from scratch, with step by step demonstrations of each stage – from rendering and checking the artwork, to applying the resist to copper clap boards, to etching, to drilling the PCB’s.

[Note: Some audio issues in this video due to a glitch in the software encoding that could not be remedied. Drat!]

The PCB artwork and schematics for the Apollo Launch Vehicle Digital Computer Logic Devices are available on my Design and Engineering page.

Read more.

From WIRED Autopia:

Kor and his team built the three-wheel, two-passenger vehicle at RedEye, an on-demand 3-D printing facility. The printers he uses create ABS plastic via Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM). The printer sprays molten polymer to build the chassis layer by microscopic layer until it arrives at the complete object. The machines are so automated that the building process they perform is known as “lights out” construction, meaning Kor uploads the design for a bumper, walk away, shut off the lights and leaves. A few hundred hours later, he’s got a bumper. The whole car – which is about 10 feet long – takes about 2,500 hours.

Besides easy reproduction, making the car body via FDM affords Kor the precise control that would be impossible with sheet metal. When he builds the aforementioned bumper, the printer can add thickness and rigidity to specific sections. When applied to the right spots, this makes for a fender that’s as resilient as the one on your Prius, but much lighter. That translates to less weight to push, and a lighter car means more miles per gallon. And the current model has a curb weight of just 1,200 pounds.

To further remedy the issues caused by modern car-construction techniques, Kor used the design freedom of 3-D printing to combine a typical car’s multitude of parts into simple unibody shapes. For example, when he prints the car’s dashboard, he’ll make it with the ducts already attached without the need for joints and connecting parts. What would be dozens of pieces of plastic and metal end up being one piece of 3-D printed plastic.

“The thesis we’re following is to take small parts from a big car and make them single large pieces,” Kor says. By using one piece instead of many, the car loses weight and gets reduced rolling resistance, and with fewer spaces between parts, the Urbee ends up being exceptionally aerodynamic.” How aerodynamic? The Urbee 2′s teardrop shape gives it just a 0.15 coefficient of drag….

Read more.

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!

A detailed look into the complex world of Oreo separation- featuring music by my band, Anamanaguchi

Image via ptiprototype

A main barrier to entry in developing new products is often the high cost of injection molding. The initial tooling fees mean that prototyping is reeaaaalllly expensive. From core77′s blog post on the inexpensive alternative, spin casting:

Injection molding is awesome. It’s also freaking expensive, with high tooling costs that keep it out of reach for your average independent designer, craftsperson or hobbyist. For those seeking to create smaller runs of smaller objects, the production method known as spin casting provides similar capability at a fraction of the cost.

To dumb it down a bit for the non-production-method-initiated, injection molding requires the mold—typically made from steel—be precision-machined, which is where the high cost comes in; obviously it depends on the size of what you’re molding, but generally speaking you’ll pay anywhere from high four to low six figures. Manufacturers offset these costs by producing high runs.

Here is a great overview of a desktop pick-n-place unit from DangerousPrototypes.com:

Today we take a look at an inexpensive pick ‘n’ place machine found on the Chinese auction site Taobao for 22800RMB (about $3,600).  A pick and place is a machine that puts electronic components onto a circuit board that has been coated with solder paste. To complete the prototype you just place the populated PCB into a reflow oven. We hope it will speed up production of one-offs and single prototypes.

The NeoDen TM220A is a table top pick and place designed and manufactured in China. Most PnPs are huge machines that take up a room, but this fits nicely in the workshop. It doesn’t require a separate compressor, it has a noisy internal vacuum pump that provides suction for lifting parts.

Up to 15 reels of components can be loaded. 12 x 8mm, 2 x 12mm, and 1 x 16mm. A tray at the front holds larger components like chips. The bigger TM240A that has twice as many reels and costs $1000 more. For us the TM220A is the ideal size. More importantly, it’s light enough to carry up two flights of steep stairs into the workshop.

Read more.

As part of the larger Code Across America initiative, the NYU Poly Varick Street Incubator is hosting an all-day (9 to 9) app coding event this Saturday, February 23rd.

For this awesome, one-day civic hack day, we will have a little bit for everyone. If you are interested in building civic apps, we have some high value data sets for you to chew on. If you are interested in developing NYC’s 21st Century technology policy, we will have thought leaders for you to debate. If you don’t know where to start, we will have previous BigApps winners walk you though the concept of building a civic app.

The day will be broken down into three tracks…

1. BEGINNER (Technical and non-technical) – Idea-a-thon! Let’s prototype civic apps based on Civic Data! Come learn from Ontodia, BigApps 3.0 grand prize winners, and learn how to build awesome civic apps.

2. ADVANCED (Technical) – A mini-race for reuse by taking Code For America’s Open Source apps and tailor them to NYC.

3. POLICY FOCUS (Non-technical) – Plan for the future! Discuss the future of NYC’s Internet access, Education Policy, Open Government, and Technology Industry Policy.

Attendance is $5, and there are less than a dozen spots left, so if you’re interested, you should check it out now!

About an hour ago, Mayor Bloomberg gave a press conference at BuzzFeed HQ to announce that he was extending the “We Are Made in NY” campaign, previously used for NYC films and television productions, to manufacturing and tech companies as well.

The first half hour of the video is just pre-conference setup, so I’ve cued it up to 33 minutes in, where the Mayor begins speaking about the new initiative.

In tandem with this announcement is the new We Are Made In NY website, which has job info and a list of tech companies in NYC. We’re proud to be on this list, along with our friends at MakerBot and littleBits, and all the other great firms that call NYC home.

Making Ultimate GPS breakouts! We line up the boards on a table after pick and placing before they go into the reflow oven at the end of the day.

Here’s the first of a three-part weekly series from Fran showing her process for manufacturing PCBs, from Fran’s Writings on Design and Engineering. Check back next week for the next episode!

This is my 3-part vlog mini-series on high quality PCB manufacturing, and introduction to my “make your own LVDC logic devices” project.   In these vlogs I will show the specialized tools and equipment that you will need to make your own high quality PCB’s from scratch with my own refined methods, with step by step demonstrations of each stage – from rendering and checking the artwork, to applying the resist to copper clap boards, to etching, to drilling the PCB’s, to component placement and soldering, and finally to defluxing and finishing. 

More about my PCB manufacturing process here - 
DIY Printed Circuit Board Manufacturing

Read more.

As an exhibit, he put the iPad on a pedestal, tacked up his uniform and badges, and framed his contract. The effect, on a white gallery wall, is a strangely addictive ready-made tableau about the intersection of money, aspiration, and technology.

Read more at Evan Osnos’s Letter From China blog.

As someone who is both a consumer and manufacturer of electronics, I think this is an interesting artwork. There is a lot of controversy over manufacturing in China, and I am much more interested in Chinese responses to the subject rather than from, for example, fabulists such as Mike Daisey.

New reflow oven setup! The picked and placed boards enter the oven on a conveyor belt.

Inside the oven, the boards move through three different temperature chambers in order to bake to perfection.

A finished board leaves the reflow oven.

This is a BIG upgrade from our homemade Reflowduino.

Here’s a quick shot of a USB serial backpack passing The Test. 8)

I made a simple sequencer to use with my modular synth. The circuit is based on hexinverter’s simpleseq. I wanted to be able to fit the whole circuit on a perma proto plate so I left a lot of things out like gate, hold, etc.. its basically a cd4017 chip and a mess of wires. Here are some action shots:

Here’s a quick video of me engraving a Midnight Hacker Leatherman with the laser cutter here at the Adafruit factory!

Using the hot air SMD rework station to place surface mount components on the L3GD20 Triple-Axis Gyro Breakout Board. When the tester beeps, they’re good to go!

Testing and prepping 1.2″ LED Backpacks! Each board is individually inspected and tested before going into stock — in this case the ‘X’ is a good thing

Promising advances in the manufacturing of carbon nanotubes that offer both strength and conductivity, from Rice University:

Scientists have created the first pure carbon nanotube fibers that combine many of the best features of highly conductive metal wires, strong carbon fibers and pliable textile thread. In a Jan. 11 paper in the journal Science, researchers from Rice University, the Dutch firm Teijin Aramid, the U.S. Air Force and Israel’s Technion Institute describe an industrially scalable process for making the threadlike fibers, which outperform commercially available products in a number of ways.

Read more.

Here’s an interesting profile of a Shenzen maker from the low-cost pick-and-place scene, shared by Hoektronics.com:

I’ve been living in Shenzhen for almost 2 years now, and I’m continually amazed by this city. The people here are creative, it has the best resources for building things you can find anywhere in the world, an amazing climate, and friendly people everywhere. This is the story of one particular Maker I’ve met in Shenzhen, Mr. Chen.

In my ongoing obsession with digital fabrication and small volume manufacturing, I stumbled upon the Chinese SMT Pick and Place scene. It started with the TM-240A that I found on Taobao and through that I discovered www.diysmt. om and oursmt.com. It turns out there are a bunch of people building and using low-cost pick and place machines for actual production of real products. I had to find out more.

I used my super-crappy chinese skills and posted in the diysmt forum to see if anyone was local to Shenzhen and could show me their machine. I got a couple responses, and Mr. Chen agreed to meet me and show me his operation. Always down for an adventure, I agreed and got his address. My assistant/translator and I hopped in a taxi and away we went….

Read more.

Each week on the Adafruit blog we post up about amazing companies, people and articles about being a MAKER and a business. Over the years we’ve shared how we run Adafruit, published code from our shopping cart system and given presentations on running an open-source hardware company. Every Monday we’re going to try to collect some of these resources and tag them #makerbusinessmonday & #makerbusiness. They’re in our popular Maker Business category as well, enjoy!

You can see the growing set of factory photos at our Flickr set.

Bunnie’s excellent blog series continues with part 2, this time focusing on DFM or Design For Manufacturing. He writes:

It’s time to visit the topic of yield. This is a boring subject for many engineers, but for entrepreneurs, success or failure will be determined in part by achieving a reasonable yield. Unlike software, every copy of a physical good will have slight imperfections. Sometimes the imperfections will cancel out; and sometimes the imperfections gang up and degrade performance. As production volume ramps, these corner cases start adding up and a certain fraction of product ends up non-salable. In a robust design, the failing fraction may be so small that functional tests can be simplified, leading to further cost reductions. In contrast, designs sensitive to component tolerances will require extensive testing, and will suffer heavy yield losses. Reworking the defective units incurs extra labor and parts charges, ultimately leading to profit erosion.

Thus, a major challenge of moving from the engineering bench to mass production is re-designing to improve robustness in the face of normal manufacturing tolerances. This is called “design for manufacturing”, or DFM.

You can read more here. Also check out the posts about his manufacturing tour of China.

Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!

Signs of Changes Taking Hold in Electronics Factories in China @ NYTimes.com.

CHENGDU, China — One day last summer, Pu Xiaolan was halfway through a shift inspecting iPad cases when she received a beige wooden chair with white stripes and a high, sturdy back.

At first, Ms. Pu wondered if someone had made a mistake. But when her bosses walked by, they just nodded curtly. So Ms. Pu gently sat down and leaned back. Her body relaxed.
The rumors were true.

When Ms. Pu was hired at thisFoxconn plant a year earlier, she received a short, green plastic stool that left her unsupported back so sore that she could barely sleep at night.

Eventually, she was promoted to a wooden chair, but the backrest was much too small to lean against. The managers of this 164,000-employee factory, she surmised, believed that comfort encouraged sloth.

Tag Connect is a neat new in-circuit programming cable that allows you to shrink the footprint of your programming pins on your pcb.  They offer quite a few sizes of the adapter cable, and even have a version that will work with the Adafruit USBtinyISP.  They offer pre-designed footprints for most major CAD programs, including Eagle and KiCad.  That other little PCB in the photo above is a retaining clip.  This allows you to hold the programming cable in place on the board hands-free.  They offer 6, 10, and 14 pin versions, and cost about $30 per cable.

via ThingamaFOB

Breaking apart the pixels from the PCB, I realized they’d make great snowflakes too!

Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!

Here’s how Fran makes all of the Frantone PCBs for her products!

Every printed circuit board that ever went into a Frantone product after 1999 was hand made by myself.  That is a lot of circuit boards!  There are so many tutorials about how to make “do it yourself” PCB’s, and any of them might be fine for prototyping a simple design or one off board, but imagine how hard it would be to mass manufacture dozens of different PCB designs to the tightest possible tolerances for an entire product line for a decade, all by hand?  Well, so far as I am aware, I am the only one in the boutique effects world crazy enough to have tried it – and really done it.  And this is how….

Read more.

Each week on the Adafruit blog we post up about amazing companies, people and articles about being a MAKER and a business. Over the years we’ve shared how we run Adafruit, published code from our shopping cart system and given presentations on running an open-source hardware company. Every Monday we’re going to try to collect some of these resources and tag them #makerbusinessmonday & #makerbusiness they’re in our popular Maker Business category as well, enjoy!

Check out the Turn Wright Machine Works videos from Machinist Keith Fenner. Thanks for this tip from Alex Moffat, who shared the following:

I think you might be interested in this guy in the context of the maker movement. He’s not a new style maker but what you might describe as an “old style” machinist. What I find most interesting about any and all of his videos is his combination of incredible skill, really pretty impressive video presence and the way he’s able to pitch the level of explanation of what he’s doing appropriately between people like me who might be able to identify a lathe and experts. Watching Keith explaining how to cut threads on a lathe, or seeing him weld, or listen to his explanation of how he restored his upright drill, gives you a new appreciation for how
small batch physical objects are actually build. Really, worth watching.

Yeah, these are great! Thanks Alex!

Laen has just opened up an online shop for PCBs created through the OSH Park service.  The PCBs are sold with permission from the creators.  While some of the PCBs may be on hand, it looks like many will be added to the next PCB order once you order it in the store.  This is a great idea, and I hope everyone who submits their board to OSH Park opts-in.

Learn more about the OSH Park PCB service here.

UPDATE: Looks like the store is just a place for Laen to unload extra PCBs.  For a maker marketplace, please checkout tindie.com.

Paul shows off his custom made pin state test rig for testing on a Teensy 3.0.

I wanted a board that shows the state of all I/O pins on LEDs with all of these properties….

• Works for Digital Input, Output, and Input Pullup
• Pushbutton to drive the pin high, very weak pulldown (much weaker than on-chip pullup)
• Works for analog pins (thumbwheel pot), but also works when the same pin is used for digital
• LED shows actual analog level – LED current should be linear to actual voltage
• LED current does not interfere with analog voltage
• LED does not interfere with weak signals, or input pullup or pulldown
• Inexpensive – under $0.50 per pin – many parts are ok, as long as they’re cheap!

…

I realize this is probably excessive design for most people, but when you’re making a development board and testing nearly every major Arduino library, it’s amazing how handy tools like this can be.  So I thought I’d document this little circuit, and especially the 150K feedback resistor trick that makes it work so well with these higher impedances and the chip LMV358 opamp.

Check out the full post for more circuit details and photos.

Testing LCD of all different sizes!