My first manufactured Printed Circuit Board

As you might have noticed I thoroughly enjoy building embedded projects. An Arduino starter kit got me interested in software development and that let me  to a bachelors in information technology and my career as a software developer, 

Every time when my project has past the initial breadboard prototype phase and I want to create a permanent circuit i hit the same hurdle. I use plenty of IO pins and a lot of the inputs and outputs require either a input voltage or reference to ground or both, Most boards only provide one or two, maybe three of these. So I designed a simple breakout board to solve this issue.

In the photo above the bottom row is where you would connect it to your microprocessor. The next two rows are connected to these pins and provides the ability to add pull/down resistors. If you want to use servo connectors then the next row should be bridged to your VCC pin so you create a VCC rail and the top rail should be bridged to GND to create a reference to ground rail. I attached some photos of a recent project where I used two boards to breakout all the pins for an Arduino pro micro. I also upgraded my raspberry Pi photobooth with one of these breakout boards.

I am very happy with the result. I used EAGLE to design the PBS's and https://oshpark.com/ to manufacture them. oshpark provides a EAGLE plugin that will help generate the files for manufacturing to their liking. And that's a very big help for an amateur digital PCB design like me.

Taking your prototype to complete project has never been so easy. See attached files if you want to make your own.

prototyping_header_breakout_board.zip
File Size:	3 kb
File Type:	zip

Download File

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