Hello ,
I tried my second shield with the aim to either use it to control leds directly or as music effects streamer for
other wled instances that do not have a mic . My kinds loved it . I hope you approve and give feedback
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Lookin good. Nice work.
Thank you Jinx, I should have just sent it to you ,As you advised before I added the header pins , not sure what also can we add to make our projects like the commercial ones or at least improve on it . Can we revers engineer one of the commercial boards ? ( i like QuinLed stuff) but was not sure if the schismatics are public
I really want to do that because I am staring to like making those shields ( still I am having issue seeing small parts when I get tired ) . do you think it is worth ? Or is our design ready for pcbway ?
That all depends on what you want your board to be. With mine even though it was for the 8266 I tried to give it all of the options from mic to ir remote to 2 level shifted outputs as well as a relay to cut the voltage to the led’s. I know that I will not use all of that at any one time but it seemed nice to have that swiss army knife ability in as small a package that I could put together.
Quindor has some nice compact shields with many options. I don’t think I would copy him as that’s his and I am sure he spent a lot of time designing and testing them. I don’t think I will take anything to pcbway as I kind of enjoyed making my project and having someone else make it is a little less satisfying to me even if it were my design. But that’s just me.
At some point I will make a few more and will even work up an esp32 version for the mega(ish) tree I plan to create for next Christmas. The only problem is the way I did mine takes a considerable amount of time with all the tight soldering. 1 tip I can offer is that for those lines of solder, I first ran a wire across those solder points to make sure they had good connections and to make it easy to connect them all. Way easier to bridge the gaps when you have a wire there for the solder to grab.
I am not doing anything else expect DIY now so i have a lot of free time , i have around 5 esp32 and I ordered 10 more , for wled project(s) I want a mic , line-in and I want some kinda voltage regulator to ensure 5V ( 12V To 5V Buck Converter to reuse old 12v PSU and I assume more protection if someone use 12V PSU by mistake ) . I want to also add an RF remotes but was not sure if they are easily available
I thought Quindor shields designs available as DIY , we are not going to sell them , i will dig to try to see that , I am kinda sure there are available .
What I meant by pcbway is that they will spare us the hard part of wiring but we will still do some soldering . I am not sure of their prices and shipping but I heard its really cheap .
For the wiring tips , I am a little slow , please show me what you mean on the picture of the shield you have made before . I am very bad at soldering and I faced issues with the noise on the line-in because I did not solder correctly . I also had a lot of problems connecting the green terminal blocks also because of bad soldering ( Or bad eyes ) So please I can use all the help you can offer
[edit : i could not find any free design from Quindor shields and i stopped looking because as you said it is not fair to him , i found some free designs and info on easyeda forum but not specific to leds , i will try to experiment , if you have any design in mind then let me know because I have spare mcus and i can try anything ]
here is an example of running wire across the holes. Then just solder the wire to the contacts on the board. That’s how I did those solder traces. To change directions I would go through to the other side and then back to the bottom a hole or two later to keep most of it on the bottom. Note: I used dual sided boards.
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Hello Jinx , I thought this is what I did in my breakout board 2d picture above ,i got a utp cable wires across the holes that you can see in colors ( orange for 5V , blue for ADC , white is GND and green is DATA) and i just soldered the ends . I have only single sided boards ,if it makes any difference then I will try some dual sided boards
Sorry bro if i misunderstood your point , i am little down today and i had to go on the 420 road
No worries. I was just showing you an easy way to solder the whole way.
Your use of just the wires and only solder at the ends is good and should not be any problem. I was just providing another idea if you wanted it to look all soldered and to not see the wire jumpers.
On mine there are a few insolated jumpers as I could not come up with a way for everything to not cross one another. Either way is 100% fine. On mine the insolated wire jumpers are only on the lines running to my screw terminal block (with the exception of the one from the shifter to the relay). All the others are solder traced wires. It all depends on how much energy and eye strain you want to do lol.
I just used the network cable because it is what I have , later i seen someone mentioning that having shielded wire is better specially for line-in or mic input to ADC . So it turns out be a good thing . Not sure if this have any effect but I was thinking of using the same wire as you but thought it is not a good idea to have a lot of exposed wires , does it make any difference ?
It’s not running any distance so I don’t think it is a problem. I did my best to keep my ground traces away from the others. I don’t know if that helped at all but it didn’t hurt. I used to install wired security systems so having wire was not a problem for me. It starts to become a problem when you run your data line tight with the ground. The further you run it tight to the ground line the higher the chance of having data issues. The bonus of my soldering over the bare wire is that it gives greater surface area for the voltage/signals to travel over. This still is likely not much of an issue in such short runs. I mean look at printed circuit boards, those traces are often quite small and work fine.
I wish the quindor boards had a mic and line in. Sounds like you are designing an awesome controller!
Thank you for the kind words , we had to do our own because we have no other option .
The mic/line-in in QuinLed for sure would be a great idea.
Is it not possible for you to get access to the ADC pins on QuinLed HW ? I think I seen someone on the discord doing that . If so you can also have your leds dance to music
cheers
