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PCB Manufacturing, Prototyping & R&D in the Maldives

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...
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Turning a TP-LINK TL-MR3020 into an Audio player, stream player etc... you name it..

Its been a while i have been messing with TP-LINK TL-MR3020 router. Before with couple of modifications to hardware and software i made a temperature monitor with room light controller via a custom web interface. If you view below links you will have an idea. http://pixelatedpic.blogspot.com/2013/01/openwrt-on-tl-mr3020-controlling-arduino.html http://pixelatedpic.blogspot.com/2013/04/openwrt-on-tl-mr3020-controlling.html This time i flush the TL-MR3020 with Openwrt. After couple of usb packages and audio packages i just plug in the USB sound card (which was given by whoknowz -  https://www.facebook.com/nashith ) to the router. When the USB sound card is detected from the linux, you can check by command dmesg. Then install the madplay or any player you prefer. I installed madplay because it play audio streams and play local files. For test i played the audio stream from atoll radio and it works great. Just ssh the router and pass this command wget -o - http://radioatoll.s...
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Arduino + Processing

Processing the data from arduino Processing the data from arduino Recently i found this tool to visualize the data from the arduino or any device. Processing is an arduino IDE like software which is similar syntax as arduino, difference is when it gets data you can draw anything. Example a graph or pan, tilt of an object.
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OpenWrt on TL-MR3020 controlling Arduino - CONTINUED

Temperature Monitoring added Now temperature sensor data is view-able from the web interface, LM35 attached to arduino senses the temperature. Once the status update request send from the router to arduino in a given interval, Arduino replies with the pin status and sensor data. That data can be stored in a Lite DB for further use or to draw the graph on the web GUI. Currently it is displayed on the GUI for testing purposes.
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ATmega328 is no longer blank, it loaded with Arduino boot loader

Blank ATmega328 flushed with Arduino boot loader Flushed ATmega circuit built and testing with sketches (This  board is named as  "pixelduino") :-) My recent test with Arduino is flushing an ATmega328 with arduino boot loader and its successful. I have an Arduino UNO SMD version and its loaded Arduino ISP sketch, to make it as an ISP programmer. Arduino UNO connected to Blank ATmega328 as an ISP programmer. After  flushing its loaded with blink sketch for test and it works well. So now i can avoid the Arduino board in some of my final projects. 
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Arduino and RS485 communication

This experiment was bit delayed due to lack of libraries for RS485 for Arduino. After lots of frustrations, i manage to make it work with soft-serial. Master controller send the command in bytes with [slaveid,status,level] and when a specific id slave response to it and lit and LED. Level byte is an analog value sent by master to dim the LED. RS485 is a long distance communication protocol which is used is several industrial applications so it can be used to monitor and control devices in a twisted pair network. still more to come....
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OpenWrt on TL-MR3020 controlling Arduino

After bricking one router i decided not to try to increase the storage and go with the capabilities which it already have. TL-MR3020 from TP-LINK have a UART but the problem with interconnection was  TL-MR3020 out puts 3.3v and Arduino UNO is 5v. So after trying couple for methods trying to level the serial data voltage, finally 74LS04 is used the step up the TX from router to 5v and it was success and Arduino see the data. Then tried to run a shell script from a webpage run in web server inside the router. After couple of frustrations i manage to run with html+javascript...thats a long story... Anyways it works perfectly and more mods will be done soon.
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