Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category.

Motorboard – Easydriver/Arduino/PKE243DA interface r1

motorboard

I picked up 50 PKE243DA Oriental motor steppers cheaply on eBay. They came with cables terminated using a funky Molex connector, fortunately Farnell have a knockoff socket for these for about 1USD each (still expensive but I can tolerate that). This board holds an Easydriver (which are crazy cheap on eBay) and interfaces to the Arduino/terminates to the PKE243DA molex connector. Gerbers and Kicad files below!

motorboard.tar

Atari Punk Console rev3

ataripunkr3

UPDATE: You can now buy this on my shop.

I’ve sent a 3rd revision of the Atari Punk Console design out to fab, as shown above. The new version incorporates a bunch of changes based on my experience with my first soldering workshop, including making the pads a bit bigger, increasing text size, removing redundant designators etc. Here’s the video on the workshop experiences, the Kicad files and Gerbers are linked below.

AtariPunkConsole.tar

Arduino 8 Channel ADC Board r3

ADCr3

As discussed in the video from yesterday, this version of the LTC1859 board splits out digital and analogue ground planes. Gerbers and Kicad files below:

LTC1859.tar

Veeco Nanoscope V Multimode AFM First Imaging Tests

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Today I decided to get the AFM I have here up and running. I’ve not had any formal training on an AFM (Atomic Force Microscope) so I’m feeling my way as I go. As a first test I wanted to try something with quite large feature sizes, I had no calibration standard so acquired some used wafers (in this case a late 90s FPGA (ProASIC)) with relatively large features as an initial test.

The image above shows some of the features I assume on the upper metal layer of the FPGA. The feature size seems to be around 200 to 700nm which seems about right for 90s tech. Cantilever installation, laser alignment and the imaging process is non-trivial. The videos below document the process I used to get these images:

These two images were taken in “height” mode. They didn’t come out very well to my mind. It seems that switching the imaged value to “amplitude” (amplitude of what if not effective height I don’t know) seemed to produce much better images like that shown above.

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Here are some more amplitude images…

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