Friday, August 28, 2015

Arduino Nano + nRF24L01+ prototyping board and epic FAIL

I've been working on a prototyping board to connect the Arduino Nano and nRF24L01+ reliably. Bad breadboards and clumsy jumper wires have caused me a fair share of headaches and lost hours already, so I wanted something easy to use and reusable. So I designed a small prototyping board that will do just that, and a bit more.

The board not only connects the two devices, but it also breaks out all of the Arduino's pins, and adds ground and 5V pins next to those as well. So micro servos and three wire analog sensors can be connected directly to the board.

The board also lets you choose to which pin you want to connect the CS and CE pins of the nRF, although the choice is limited to digital pins 4-9. The IRQ pin can be connected to digital pin 2 or 3. And last, but certainly not least, the board has various SPI pin multiplexing options aboard which can be selected. It puts both Nerd Ralph's two wire and three wire solution at your disposal to experiment with :)

Today the first few boards arrived from OSH Park and they look gorgeous.

And the bottom features some nice schematics which explain the multiplexing options:

Nearly all the parts needed to assemble the boards have arrived as well. Of course I couldn't wait and stuck in a Nano to see how it looks.
Pretty neat eh? But. Wait. What? Noooooooooooooooooooooo. I messed up the footprint of the Nano :( I accidentally swapped the rows of pins. Now I need to stick the Nano in the back of the board...
See how the power pins align correctly now?

FAIL

If only I had messed up the nRF footprint as well :( Good thing I only ordered three and not a dozen. Oh well, back to the drawing board. Looks like I'll probably have to layout the entire board again...

I'm really happy with the quality of the boards by the way, the silkscreen is aligned perfectly and the purple board with gold finish looks wonderful. I was a bit worried that the small text would be impossible to read, but it turned out fine.

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