This is what a 100 µAh micro-battery looks like

ITEN 100uAh battery

Electronic components have shrunk a lot over the year, but batteries are usually one of the larger items in a design. ITEN changes that with solid state lithium-ion micro-batteries in the shape of SMD components with up to 100 µAh capacity. This is clearly not going to power your next smartphone, but ITEM micro-batteries could be found in ultra-low-power sensors potentially replacing non-rechargeable coin cell batteries with much higher capacities (e,g. 100 mAh). ITEN says their solid-state micro-batteries are superior to coin cell batteries because those are polluting, difficult to assemble on PCB, costly to recycle and require periodic maintenance once a battery is depleted. In addition, some low-power embedded systems still require high current pulses for instance to drive RF transceivers or actuators leading hardware engineers to rely on oversized coin cell batteries as those can only deliver small currents. The carbon footprint of such batteries is claimed to […]

Learn soldering and programming with the Arduino Make Your UNO Kit

Arduino Make Your UNO Kit

Arduino Make Your UNO Kit is a kit with two boards, one for the microcontroller and the other for audio, and all components required that can be used to learn how to solder and then Arduino programming. Once soldering and assembly are complete you’ll hopefully get a working Arduino UNO and an audio synthesizer shield. But before you get there, you’ll need to equip yourself with a soldering iron and some soldering tin to solder the components below to the two PCBs. Package content: Arduino Make Your UNO board’s components Make Your UNO PCB Socket for ATMega328p MCU Microchip ATmega328p 8-bit AVR microcontroller USB Type-C serial adapter board Various 1k Ohm, 10k Ohm. and 1M Ohm resistors 3x Ceramic capacitors (22pF) 3x Electrolytic capacitors (47uF) 7x Polyester capacitors (100nF) 1x 1N4007 diode 1x 16MHz crystal 4x Yellow LEDs, 1x Green LED 1x Push-Button 1x MOSFET 2x I/O connectors 6-pin header […]

Elecrow – Make Your Making Easier (Sponsored)

elecrow manufacturing

Elecrow was officially founded in 2014, and is located in Shenzhen city. Elecrow is a company that integrates research, development, production, and sales. In the last several years, our company has expanded from 2 founders to more than 140 members. Our business has expanded from open-source hardware to STEAM education, smart home, 3D printing… More than that, we provide a one-stop OEM/ODM solution service for our customers. With these products and services, Elecrow helps makers or startups bring creative ideas to life, and assists enterprises to cope with supply chain work which makes them reduce costs and concentrate on development and marketing. Why choose Elecrow? High Quality: Elecrow regards quality as its first priority. Elecrow ensures the proper operation of its quality control system and guarantees the quality of all the products ordered. We constantly update manufacturing equipment, improve manufacturing levels, and strive for excellence to provide customers with better […]

PCBWay – A community-focused PCB manufacturer (Sponsored)

PCBWay community PCB designs

There are many PCB manufacturers in China, but PCBWay has been around for over a decade providing PCB prototype and manufacturing services, and is one of the companies that care the most about the community with project sharing and various community events organized over the years. If you use PCBWay services, you will join the more than 70,000 customers who already used their services, and the company claims an over 99% on-time delivery rate thanks in part to having factories in Shenzhen that work in three shifts per day. In order to better serve its customer around the world, the PCB manufacturer also has offices in Hong Kong, as well as Paris, for European customers. PCBWay services include PCB prototyping and PCBA assembly services for small volume production, and the company highlights its SMT expertise and capabilities with high-speed Pick-and-Place machines that can place up to 28000 components per hour […]

Elecrow’s Raspberry Pi Pico Advanced Kit ships with 32 electronics modules, 32 project tutorials

Raspberry Pi Pico Advanced Kit

We’ve just reviewed the Raspberry Pi 4-powered CrowPi L laptop and Crowtail Starter kit used to teach programming and electronics, but Elecrow has now launched the “Raspberry Pi Pico Advanced Kit” with 32 electronics modules, a smart kit car, and 32 tutorials that should be a more affordable way of teaching electronics and programming. However, it does so in a different way, as instead of using visual programming and Python, the Raspberry Pi Pico Advanced Kit’s lessons rely on MicroPython, and the projects are different with for example parts to build an obstacle avoidance, line tracking, or remote controlled car.   Package content: Optional Raspberry Pi Pico board with Raspberry Pi RP2040 dual-core Cortex-M0+ microcontroller Breadboards 2x 400 holes solderless breadboards 1x 170 holes solderless breadboard Display modules 1602 LCD display module (Blue) OLED module 4-bit digital LED display module Lights 10x 5mm LEDs in green, red, blue, yellow, and […]

CrowPi L Review – Part 2: Learn programming and electronics with a Raspberry Pi 4 laptop

CrowPi L review learn programming electronics

In the first part of our review of CrowPi L Raspberry Pi 4 laptop for education, we checked the hardware and accessories such as the CrowTail starter kit with various sensors and other electronics modules, and showed how to install or remove the Raspberry Pi 4 SBC from the laptop shell. I’ve now had more time to play with the educational software, so I’ll report my experience with the laptop when learning game design and hardware control with Letscode visual programming IDE, as well as the Python lessons for more advanced students. Reinstalling CrowPi OS image It’s the rainy season here in Thailand meaning it’s both hot and humid, and even though I’m not entirely sure it’s related, I recently had to reinstall Raspberry Pi OS on one of my Raspberry Pi with a corrupted SD card. It happened again with the CrowPi L after I left it in its […]

Altium Designer adds 3D PCB layout tool

Altium 3D PCB design

While we like open-source tools such as KiCAD, Altium has added a pretty cool feature to the Altium Designer program with a 3D layout tool, which as its name implies, allows the design of 3D PCBs… The new 3D layout tool relies on 3D-MID technology that combines electrical circuits with three-dimensional mechanical parts. I’m not sure who really needs this, but I have to admit the results look pretty neat. Altium explains the design process is quite similar to standard 2D PCBs, and designers would create a layout on the surface of a 3D substrate using the standard library components and with the connectivity driven by the schematic design in the same way as with a standard PCB. You can check out how it works in a video shared on Altium’s LinkedIn account. The designer would then export the files in the format required by LPKF Laser & Electronics AG’s […]

Pinecil V2 soldering iron gets BL706 Bluetooth LE RISC-V MCU, USB PD EPR support

Pinecil V2 RISC-V soldering iron

PINE64 is about to launch the second generation Pinecil RISC-V soldering iron with the Pinecil V2 featuring a new Bouffalo Lab BL706 RISC-V microcontroller with Bluetooth LE connectivity, optimizations for higher power levels, as well as tentative support for the new USB PD EPR standard (Extended Power Range) working at up to 28V. I don’t solder every day, but when I do, I use my Pinecil soldering iron, as it’s heating super fast and does the job, and in my case, works quite better than the TS100 soldering iron. So it should come as no surprise that the Pincel is the most popular consumer hardware from the PINE64 community (after SOPine modules), and the new Pinecil V2 is a welcome upgrading building on the same design but with Bluetooth LE connectivity and a lower tip resistance. Pinecil V2 preliminary specifications: MCU – Bouffalo Lab BL706 32-bit RISC-V microcontroller @ 144 […]

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