Reddit:Electronics

Here are some of the PCBs I've made myself for an 8 bit computer project I'm working on. The boards, except the A register board, are double sided. Unfortunately no plated throughholes but there are functional vias with a piece of wire. Will definitely be posting more update about the entire project as I'm slowly finishing it.

Used some nickel plated 3x10mm copper, cheap wire, and some banana connector from work

At first I thought it would be a simple upgrade.

But Damn, had to learn about Tolerances, differential pairs and Resistances.

First PCB that I ordered had incorrect pin pitches, they were supposed to be smaller. Had to redesign the entire board and use 3rd layer for power routing. Ordered from JLCPCB as it was easier to find through hole USB 3.0 on their site. 2nd layer is not shown but it's a grounding plane.

There's Probably a ton of improvements to be made.

I want to thank folks over at r/PCB and r/PrintedCircuitBoard, those guys are a real deal.

Building a little flyback driver and this was the only MOSFET I had with a high enough Vds and low enough Vgs to work…hopefully I didn’t overheat it too badly.

I am making my own disc golf basket light. It features 32 leds, battery management for a 21700 battery and constant current driver. All housed in a 3d printed case and polycarbonate lens/cover.

This was designed and 'built' by me, by that I mean I designed the circuit, PCB layout, 3D model (and printed them myself) and only had JLCPCB fabricate the PCB as that is outside of my abilities.

Edit: I forgot to mention that I also programmed this all, originally in Arduino C (in 2024) and then in 2025 I ported it over to micropython and made it more scalable.

These came from an AT&T plant that worked on submarine data systems. All officially inspected. Just wanted to share for anyone else who nerds out on this stuff.

If any of you remember or came across it, a few weeks ago I posted about making my own radio into a pcb. I couldn’t have done it without your advice.

The pcb had some hiccups but it works amazingly well. I used the antenna and speaker and I could hear it all so cleanly it was really exciting. (I may grab a video next time).

About the hiccups… 1) On of the Ic pins was floating, in the design it was supposed to connect to the 9V plane but it didn’t as the plane there was an island (I thought DRC would get it and also I avoided islands because of this…). Small issue easy fix the pin was just deciding about the volume being a bar or 1 Led.

2)The banana connectors refused to connect well while screwed in and had to get soldered.

3) My fault again, while screwing in the 9v connection I accidentally scratched the gndplane at the bottom and when soldering they shorted…. (We love current limited power supplies that didn’t kill everything)

4) The pin footprint for output was 1.00mm and th pins I had were 1.27mm (like the footprint for input)..

What I learned and my advice for anyone that wants to make their own: 1) TEST POINTS have some test hooks or pads in places you’d want to test (just get the breadboard and while making it write down which points you test alot)

2) Gerber viewer and be really careful about (kicad) small blue lines showing that something isn’t connecting.

3) Choose right footprints…

4)Good grounding. I could see on my oscilloscope that if I didn’t use the middle ground and just had the antenna one, the noise from on/off leds made audible clicks.

That’s all thank you very much for your advice at the early stages!

My college Electronics class final was to simply solder on parts of a pre-made circuit, and in my case it was an LED Christmas Tree. After soldering 36 TINY AS HELL LEDS, I tested it and there was no lights turning on…. Decided to test an extra LED and turns out the legs were manufactured with the long leg as the negative side and the short leg as the positive side. I’m so cooked

I'm making a FOSS racing datalogger after I got into kart racing a few years ago and saw how expensive dataloggers were

I had to make the GPS laptiming Library, the datalogger itself, designed and printed the case, and recently started on a dataviewer

Well all of that took a year to perfect, the laptiming is within 0.002s of the official laptiming, I can do track/course selection, laps, pace, and even split-timing on-device.

Now sure, it logs data, but it's not a datalogger without more data. Most other sensors are easy to implement... Engine rpm tho... what a nightmare

I'm a software guy, never made hardware before, barely have any idea what I'm doing but i'm making progress. Right now I'm dealing with SD cards being corrupted so I finally gave in and bought a scope to learn more, managed to build a drastically cleaner circuit than I had before and I got some hope.

(Yes vibration kills, but this is a new problem with adding the tachometer, and I haven't even gotten to testing that on track yet)

(I must do this weird capacitive dance like the "real" ones do, but I also don't have one to take apart so we're gonna just keep winging it baybe)

No I don't want to talk about how much money I've spent at this point, I'm making an open source, and cheap, datalogger

I probably should have went to school for this but hey, I've gotten this far on nothing but hopes and dreams

20 year SWE brute forcing myself into hardware