Custom ESP32-S3 development board — professionally manufactured by JLCPCB. A far cry from where it all started. It Started in a School Science Lab — Around 1998 Most people who get into electronics start with a kit, a tutorial, maybe a breadboard and some LEDs. I started by sneaking ferric chloride out of a school science lab to etch my first PCB. That was around 1998. I was living in the Maldives — a small island nation in the Indian Ocean — where there was no electronics supply chain, no maker community, no local PCB fab. Just a chemistry cabinet at school, a copper-clad board from somewhere, and a lot of curiosity. This post is about what the next 25+ years of PCB prototyping looked like from there. The early wins with proper chemicals, the years of improvisation when those chemicals disappeared, the real injuries, the failed boards, and finally — the moment JLCPCB changed ever...
After a long Que of waiting for Pi Zero,i have received it. The size of Pi Zero is very small and compact comparing to other versions of Pi. I am not going to give a review on Pi but since i like the Raspberry Pi. i would like to give some information on what i did to test its performance. For technical details go directly to raspberrypi.org. Raspberry Pi Zero running RetroPie, just for a test. For testing purposes i installed OSMC and test as a media player and i am happy with the performance. Later i installed RetroPie and check how the new hardware performed. RetroPie is cool that it enables to play almost all the retro games that we played when we were young. :) RetroPie running I am not interested of GUI so kept aside all the i candy parts and focused on controlling GPIO and runing python scripts and bash script for external hardware communication. Overall what i can say is the waiting for Pi Zero is not time wasting, Pi Zero is better and faster. Thumbs...