Category: electronics

I have enjoyed designing and making a Squid PCB badge some time ago and I have some plans for more complex PCB badges and creations. But Christmas is coming and I realized it might be fun to create some simple gift for friends and family. It was also a good opportunity to try another PCB manufacturer.

When I built my Freeform ESP8266 OLED MQTT client and wrote about it I mentioned I have a long-running project which captures the data I wanted to display on the device. I call it Room Monitor and it is nothing special - a bunch of sensors connected to ESP8266 and powered with a battery. I am going to briefly sum‑up its hardware and software development in the following two articles. This one is going to cover prototyping and the next one the current (and semi-finished) PCB version.

I built my first custom keyboard (Katana60) back at the beginning of this year and the second one (Corne) a few months ago, but I am already designing another one. Apart from the fun I have as I build and customize those keyboards, it is about looking for a more effective keyboard layout for my daily work. This article sums up my journey which leads to the decision to design own keyboard.

I designed my first PCB. It’s not useful at all and very primitive electrically. But I have learned a lot.

I have build katana60 - a custom mechanical keyboard - a few months ago and I use it on a daily basis. But there are so many interesting keyboard designs out there. It just too tempting not to build another one.

This time I chose the Corne Keyboard - or ckrbd if you want. This one is designed by a guy from Japan who calls himself foostan.

When you have a custom keyboard with some nice keycaps and case, you might start to think, what should I customize next? Let’s start with the cable which connects my keyboard to my computer!

My second freeform creation, or third if we include The CyborgDuck is here. I wanted to do something simple in order to gather more experience and improve my skills.

Behold, our cyborgduck overlords are coming!

I have been watching those amazing freeform creations by people like @MohitBhoite and @jipraus for some time. I examined many entries for the recent Circuit Sculpture Contest on hackaday.com and have been thinking, that I would love to build something like that, but I had been convinced that my skills are not good enough.

But skills can be trained and learned. So I finally ordered a few brass rods and tried my first freeform sculpture. Here’s the result.

A story about how I was reminded that impatience and impetuosity can backfire when dealing with hardware.