02 Nov

Advanced PCBs and IoT ... soldering iron?

Richard Lin (Ducky) ducky edg pcbs iot

It's been a while since the last update, but lots of boards have been getting built, new features implemented and tested, and general fun had all around. Perhaps some of those details will be a post for another day.

The most interesting board this time around is the IoT soldering iron:
IMG_20231101_143154

To be more precise, it's a JBC controller, inspired by a similar open-source project, AxxSolder, but with USB Type-C PD, IoT, and a buck converter as a power stage. The Type-C PD provides a convenient, universal connector, while the IoT capability allows a PC interface to adjust parameters on-the-fly and monitor graphs (in addition to the more traditional built-in encoder / screen interface).

The buck converter is more interesting - partly this is meant as a tech demonstrator / proof-of-concept of a generated (as is in line with the electronics design HDL project's goals) custom synchronous buck converter, and part of it is meant to accommodate a wider range of iron tips (with different resistances) and input voltages. And maybe also be cleaner from an EMI standpoint, since it should be a more DC waveform instead of a very square wave running through a long loop of wire.

It's also got a dual-packed opamp, which combines the opamps used in the thermocouple amp and current sense block. Not all that new conceptually in light of our SCF paper that introduced the basic logic last year, but it's nice to have it hardware proven.

On the open-source firmware side, this all runs ESPHome, which among other things, provides simple config-based firmware generation with a builtin IoT dashboard. Since ESPHome (currently) includes neither USB-PD nor a synchronous converter, those have been custom built, and the code (ESPHome config + custom components - which were not trivial to write) is all open-source on GitHib if you have (or want to make!) an IoT USB-PD board. All the hardware is baseline functional (and then some) - the PD negotiates a configurable voltage, and the buck circuit... bucks.

image%20%2811%29
ESPHome dashboard

esphome_config
ESPHome config of the custom component

It even bucks with synchronous PWM with deadtime, using the ESP32 MCPWM module, and blanking to read the thermocouple!
pv_blanking

In the grander scheme of things, this was just one piece of a larger panel, which also included other more advanced boards like a USB key where the PCB is the USB contact, and a IoT fan driver with a discrete ESP32-C3 and RF circuit (which worked, once the split ground plane was fixed with copper tape 🤪 and blobs of solder).

IMG_20231024_132818
Surprisingly, we did not get any comments from the board house about the weird geometry of this panel

Next Post Previous Post

Search

Popular Tags

foray origami robots blimp ducky vr edg SLAM computer vision computational design roco slam Origami rocolib arduino RoCo design Robot Compiler simulation Motion Planning autonomy edg-model mesh reinforcement learning; multi-agent; mean-field; logics create; kalman filter; motors imu friction mesh network tank esp32 networking contacts multi-agent pushing auxetic machine learning dynamics esp now visual processing wireless control communication webapp pcbs structure ROCO i2c path planning cars Robotica reinforcement learning computer skill openmv test motor dataset visual DARPA odometry Battery surface structure power consumption dash port-arrays modeling origami paper frequency diversity semantic infrastructure auxetics feedback gondola machine vision Consensus bistable auxetic controller gestural intuition mixed reality unit cell robot crawler gestural interface open house network create; kalman filter; EM; refactoring 4-wheeled darpa; create; icra2021 apriltags lidar logic control FORAY perception Quantum Information crazyflie 433mhz optimization propeller Foray structures sensors environmental design radio DER Kullback-Leibler Divergence lasercutter tutorial von Mises Fisher Distribution IR simulink legs project management localization distributed optimization blynk Auxetics painlessmesh experiment results offline reinforcement learning exam research proposal altimeter thrust PCB sensor fusion gate or webots multi-agent path planning UAV RL integration test arnhold joystick balloon test vision processing pushing problem modeling contacts mesh networking motor configuration nodemcu swarm object detection fusionbot ros2 rviz2 gazebo conference matlab arduino nano decentralized surfaces keyboard IROS Integrated Demo throughput peripheral device paper review reinforcement learning; motorized boats Writing slam; paper review rhino Short Post range distance surp origami robot nylon pvdf elastic polymers plastic hot plates reinforcement learning; multi-agent; mean-field; game theory; mean field; reinforcement learning current reinforcement learning; multi-agent; Xbee Zigbee robot compiler spi contact neural network dynamic modeling quasi-static modeling edg-examples Kalman Filter port-array von Mises Fisher von Mises-Fisher literature review multipack car Zero Elastic Energy modes swarm control solar cars system ID serial monitor edg-ide Discrete Elastic Rods ceres debug Consensus Algorithms coriolis force dynamic model proposal wtf deep learning pdms interpolation wireless signal strength reinforcement learning; multi-agent; decentralized misc reinforcement learning; multi-agent; mean-field; stationary demo video flytrap papers steering structured field pivoting differential power detectionrate color shape edg-refactoring pain python vision Machine Learning Q-Learning Model-Free release conferences quasi-static pushing liquid crystal elastomer nonholonomic systems iot grant feedback-controlled controls trajectory optimization surface contact Characterization tool ML multi-agent path finding Liquid Crystal Elastomers Learning kinematic_model reservoir computing 2.4 GHz concept 433 MHz Bayesian Network creative Computer skill internal silicone integrated system instance segmentation marginal cost pricing bootstrapping Bayesian networks ensemble methods offline Rl hardware manipulation COVID 19 paper cutter ESP32 kalman filter; multi-robot state space delta tolling buoyancy chiral square unit cell pressure distribution model prediction thrust configuration grid fabrication firmware protobuf #activecapturingmechanism #claw 3D-CHESS; kalman filter boxboat tracking model-based RL von Mises Distribution slam; flowchart; spring-mass 3D-CHESS; 433 rssi signal strength multirobot system writing in-situ design buoyancy equations boat deployment cell cameras der newton's method Barycenter Euler-Bernoulli beam sma-based actuator game theory Bessel functions von Mises-Fisher Distributions ide HDL board design battery current sensor ZMP center of friction Multi-Agent Systems code balloon semantic segmentation MIMO communications ICRA ICML guassian processes probabilistic neural networks graph generators MBRL batch learning ros edg-compiler multirobot optitrack adaptive control motor driver submission DNN kalman filtering point cloud 2.4ghz latency scenic codesign presentations machine training preliminary exam multiple devices inkscape material multi-object tracking ICLR Python actuation catching mechanism integration flapping color_segmentation lab_data result segmentation on multiple object and centers finding competition prelab multiple blimps pid defender Synthesizable Radio 3d printing kalman filter motor distribution barometer detection lift force depth estimation cad solidworks design tool pixracer pixhawk ardupilot flight controller regression fly test sensor selection