Circuit Design

Maker’s Tablet

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For the past year or so I’ve had a project on my project list called the PiPad+.  The details on the project page are pretty generic, describing it as a DIY tablet.  I’m hoping to remedy this by fleshing out the project details and motivating myself to finish it in the coming weeks.

Like most of the Maker community, I was amazed when the PiPad came out.  When Chalk-Elec got their 10″ displays back in stock I quickly bought one so I could create my own version of the PiPad.  Of course, being myself, I couldn’t just copy what had already been done.  I had to do something new and exciting.  Right off the bat I decided I would get rid of Raspbian’s default GUI and do something new that was optimized for touch controls and my personal tastes.  I got as far as implementing a basic window manager and a grid-style homescreen before I “took a break” because GUI design is hard!  For the past year the code lived in my GitHub, gathering digital dust, until very recently when I decided to delete it.

During the long “break”, the project was also subjected to a good deal of feature creep and component scouting.  Many things have also changed in that time; I bought a 3D printer, the Raspberry Pi 2 was released, etc.  Rather than continue to let this project stagnate in its project drawer I’ve decided to try to finish up the project in the near future so I’m no longer plagued by the inexorable desire to shove in as many features as possible.  The semi-final state of the project will be as follows.

Processor:

I chose to build my tablet around the Raspberry Pi due to the large amount of community support behind the SBC.  The huge number of people tinkering with the Pi’s OS ensured that I’d be getting the maximum performance available for the hardware.  I’m currently using a Raspberry Pi 2, though I will probably upgrade to the Raspberry Pi 3 once it becomes available.  The built in WiFi and BLE will help save space inside of the tablet.  The only downside with using the Pi is the size.  Due to the dimensions of the USB port the thickness of the tablet will have to be around 2.5cm.  Rather than attempting to slim down a Pi, I opted to utilize the thickness to cram the tablet full of features as detailed below.

Screen:

Due to the amount of stuff I wanted to cram in this tablet I decided to get Chalk-Elec’s 10″ Touchscreen to use as the tablet display.  If things get too cramped I might consider upgrading to one of their bigger displays.

Battery:

For the battery I decided on an EasyAcc 10Ah Battery, commonly used as a portable phone charger.  I chose this battery because it was the largest one I could find that would fit in the tablet chassis.  It also has pass-through charging, a feature which allows the battery to power the tablet while it’s being charged.  Surprisingly, this is a rather uncommon feature in portable battery packs.

Extra Features:

Rather than building a basic tablet that won’t get much use, I decided to add extra features that would enable my version of the PiPad to be the ultimate Maker’s tablet.  The extra added features are detailed below.

Multimeter

The most important tool in a Electrical Engineer’s toolbox is his multimeter, so this one was a must have.  However, I had trouble finding a small and cheap USB multimeter, so instead I opted to make my own.  I borrowed heavily from this Instructable when designing my custom board.

Oscilloscope

An important tool for working with analog circuits is an oscilloscope.  A few months prior to starting this project I bought an Xprotolab Plain, which is a nifty little USB oscilloscope that’s surprisingly cheap.  Due to its small size I decided to add this into the tablet.  I also created an adapter to go from the Xprotolab’s header to a standard BNC connector.

Logic Analyzer

The Xprotolab Plain also had a Logic Analyzer built in so this one was a freebie.  The logic level is only 3.3V, however, so I’m toying with the idea of making an adapter to add 5V tolerance.

Bus Pirate

The Bus Pirate seems to be a commonly used tool by many makers and hackers.  I don’t have any experience with it, but decided to include it in the tablet since it didn’t take up much space.  I decided to go with version 3.6 of the hardware as that seems to be the most widely supported.

GPIO Header

Lastly, because I wasn’t using them for anything I decided to add a breakout for the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO to the tablet.  This would add some additional IO to fiddle with and was simple to add.

Plans

The components that will hopefully make the tablet are currently sitting on my workbench in a rough semblance of how they will be organized inside of the tablet.  The steps that I still need to take in order to get everything working are listed below:

  1. Populate, solder, and test the multimeter
  2. Determine how to organize the power subsystem
  3. Decide on a semi-final organization of all the parts’ locations inside of the tablet
  4. Finalize the 3D printed bezel with connector cutouts
  5. Glue the mechanics together
  6. Secure the components inside of the tablet with double sided and Kapton tape
  7. Connect everything together
  8. Design and attach a removable back plate
  9. Decide on whether to use Raspbian’s default window manager or design my own

Over the next few weeks I’ll start going through each step, trying to finish up the tablet hardware so I can move on to other projects.  For the components that I’ve custom built, I’ll post source files and separate blog posts to explain how I’ve designed these parts, and how they work.

DIY Smartwatch: Improvements for V2

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From the current progress I’ve already made on this project, I can already see a lot of mistakes and things that will need to be improved for the second PCB.  Below is a list of the ones that immediately come to mind.

  • Possibly use the onboard voltage regulator on the Adafruit display
    • The Adafruit display board already has a 3.3V regulator for the screen logic, using this would mean one less part that I need and would give me a tiny bit extra space.
  • Maybe just switch to the E-Ink display to save power
    • I was very dismayed by the enormous amount of power the screen uses.  Even if I get tricky and heavily optimize the screen usage, I’m not sure how long I can get the battery to last.  This is a last ditch solution and would probably involve an entire re-layout of the board.
  • Use through holes for the battery instead of a connector
    • The battery connector is the tallest component on the board aside from the connectors, getting rid of it would mean I can make the uber-thick watch a little bit thinner.  Since I have verified that the battery charging circuit works, I just need to decide which battery will be used I should then be able to solder it in permanently.
  • Use micro USB instead of mini
    • Same thing as above, the mini USB is pretty tall.  A micro USB connector didn’t seem much harder to solder and would give me a little extra space.
  • Get rid of reset button
    • When I’m entirely done programming the watch, I’ll most likely give it a simple case, making the Reset button entirely inaccessible anyway.  It might be better for space to replace the button with a test point.
  • Add real-time clock
    • With the added space from removing components, there might be room for an RTC that could be used to keep better track of time.
  • Enlarge accelerometer pads for easier soldering
    • As previously stated, the accelerometer is very difficult to solder, especially without a hot air station.  If I don’t decide to buy one, another option might be to enlarge the pads for the accelerometer chip connections so it is easier to touch with the soldering iron.
  • Move tall components away from microSD slot on display board
    • In line with the USB and battery connections, I need to plan ahead so that the top boards fits better with the bottom board with less wasted space.
  • Silk screen labels
    • Since I rushed to ship out the board for fab, I didn’t take the time to properly and clearly label all the components on the board.  Doing so would make identifying what needs to go where much easier and would make debugging simpler if I know what vias are attached to what.
  • Test points
    • It would probably help to have some dedicated test points to make sure the circuit is behaving as it should be.

DIY Smartwatch: Circuit Design

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This post is meant to be an explanation of the final schematic for my Smartwatch board, version 1 with a bit of reasoning behind each component and my reasoning behind why I did what I did.

Total Schematic Overview

This is just the reset button, connected to reset the AVR and BLE module.  I also originally tied the screen reset to it as well until I realized the Adafruit screen library required it to be connected to a GPIO.

This is the vibration motor circuit.  Since the motor uses up to 85mA, about twice what the AVR can supply, it’s hooked up to an N-MOSFET to amplify the current.  I also hooked up the gate of the MOSFET to a PWM pin on the AVR in case I don’t need the full vibration.  There is also a diode and capacitor attached to the leads of the motor to help reduce noise and prevent large voltage spikes.

Next are the switches.  The four-pin box above is actually a navigation switch with each pin being a connection for up, down, and press actions.  Since the AVR has built in internal pull-up resistors, the switches are all tied to ground.  I also quickly ran out of interrupt pins (there are four or five on this AVR but they also doubled as communication pins that I needed for other things) so am using PCINT pins instead.  I have never used these before and they aren’t built into the Arduino toolchain so we’ll see how using them goes.

Here is the BLE module in all of its low power glory.  I grabbed the eagle part over from the same place I got the breakout board and used his design as a reference.  There are debugging LEDs on the TX, RX, and Connect lines to show the status of the BLE module, but odds are I won’t be keeping these since LEDs take several mA and I won’t have power to spare.

Above is the power regulation circuit.  It takes the battery (3.4V – 3.7V) and regulates down to 3.3V.  I also added a power switch at the last minute in case I want to solder the battery leads directly onto the PCB.

This is the charging circuit.  It takes 5V power from the USB port and feeds it to a chip that handles the charging for me.

Next is the cheap 3-axis accelerometer I’m hoping to use for a good deal of the interactivity of the watch.  However, it is a secondary feature so if I messed up it’s not too big of a deal.

Here’s a simple brightness-detection circuit.  I want to automatically control the brightness of the screen as a means of saving power so I’ve hooked up a photoresistor in a voltage divider circuit with the output being sent to an analog pin on the AVR.

This is just the header for the screen.

Lastly is the AVR itself.  In addition to the connections I’ve already covered there’s also a voltage divider connected directly to the battery as a simple means of detecting the battery voltage as well as the USB data pins in the hopes that I can load the Arduino bootloader and program the watch directly from the computer.