iTead Studio – Skywired.net

Itead Studio’s Open PCB exchange: how it worked out

The boards I ordered last month from Itead Studio arrived with something extra: someone else’s boards! No, it was not a mistake, but a 10-cent option that I could not resist: the Open PCB service. For 10 cents above the cost of a prototype PCB order, Itead fabbed two extra boards of my design. Those boards went into a pool of boards from the other Open PCB participants, then Itead sent each of us two random boards from the pool. All participating boards are supposed to be open source. Sure, there is no guarantee that the boards will be at all useful to the recipient, but who knows, maybe something nifty will arrive!

I ordered the Open PCB option with my AK5388 ADC board. Along with my 8 copies of the board, I received two boards from strangers. Both are 5 cm x 5 cm, which is likely a popular size for Itead because it’s the maximum size for their cheapest PCB fab deals.

The first board is a thermocouple digitizer from the Boston University Rocket Team. The team has posted the schematics, layout, and Gerbers online on GitHub. The board was clearly labelled, making it easy to find the documentation in Google. It even had a QR code. though the pixels were blurred by the silkscreen and my phone was unable to read it. It’s a great idea for open source hardware, though, and would probably work if it were a little bigger.

The design uses a single MAX31855 as a thermocouple-to-digital converter. This is a neat chip that contains a thermocouple amplifier, cold-junction compensation, and a 14-bit ADC all in an 8-pin SOIC. That’s a ton of analog circuitry condensed into a single chip! It can cover temperatures from near absolute zero to molten metal, with quite respectable accuracy and resolution. The board runs the chip’s Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) to a USB 3 connector, wired in a non-standard way that carries power (12V, 5V, and 3.3V) and an SPI bus.

The Rocket Team has chosen an interesting mission. They don’t fly rockets, but rather research the design and performance of hybrid rocket motors, including firing them on a static test stand. They build their own instrumentation, all open source hardware, and this board is part of that package. I can see why they would be interested in accurately measuing the temperature of very cold and very hot things!

The board actually has some potential to be useful to me. I don’t need a thermocouple interface right now, but I can imagine using for one down the road to monitor a reflow oven or to manage the heatsink temperature in a linear amp.

The second board is a bit of a mystery.

On first inspection, I was puzzled by the single-row header right across the middle and the smaller row of holes at the upper-left side. Eventually I noticed that there are no traces running to either, so it’s likely that they are perforations to simplify cutting the board into three pieces.

The bottom portion is the least obscure. It bears the labels “Flash power control” and “X-SYNC”, so it must have something to do with photo flash. Beyond that, I’m stumped. A two-pin header for an IGBT (a three-terminal device) particularly leaves me scratching my head. The designer did a nice job of bonding his top-side ground pour to the bottom-side ground plane with plenty of vias, including all around the edge of the board.

On the upper right, there are two copies of a circuit, separated by a row of holes to aid breaking them apart. The circuit has a transistor in SOT-23, a diode, a few capacitors, a resistor, and what is likely an IC in a small 5-pin package. Looking at the topology, I think the circuit is a boost converter, at least if the unlabeled two-pad component on the center left is an inductor.

The patterns in the upper right corner are even harder to understand. They look like series chains of something, maybe resistors or LEDs. The vias in the pads and the wide traces indicate that the designer was concerned about resistance, inductance, or heat dissipation. Since the three-device chain (upper center of the board) has the triple vias to back-side copper, but does not use the copper to interconnect, I would guess heat sinking is the concern. It could be a challenge to reflow the board with the open vias in the pads, but it’s probably meant to be hand-soldered. When hand-soldering, one can keep feeding solder until the holes have wicked up their fill.

I sent some e-mail to the address in the silkscreen but got no reply. Google searches on other likely terms turned up nothing. I’m left with a board and guesses.

The Open PCB exchange is a great idea, and I’ll happily participate again in the future. The thermocouple board is an example of how it can go right. I got a well-documented board that led me to find out about the Rocket Team’s interesting work. In contrast, the Flash Power Control board is an example of what can go wrong. There is nothing to stop someone from entering an undocumented PCB in the exchange, getting documented and interesting boards but failing to repay the favor. Still, I like seeing what other people are doing and hopefully two other people enjoyed seeing what I’m up to. For 10 cents, less than a 1% increment on the cost of a PCB order, it’s worth it.

Have you tried Open PCB, and how did it work out? Are you able to shed any light on the mystery board? As always, comments are welcome!

Building the AK5388 ADC breakout board

“Honey, the package you’ve been waiting for from Hong Kong is by your computer,” said my dear wife shortly after I got home from work on Friday. Even better, a few minutes later she suggested that I spend the evening in the basement, building up one of my new boards. I have a wonderful wife!

The AK5388 ADC breakout boards finally arrived! I had a hard time waiting for them. First, Itead Studio didn’t ask me to correct the design until the day the finished boards were supposedly going to ship. (They did apologize for the delay — it sounded like there was a communications snafu between them and the fab.) Then I waited five more days for the board to be fabbed. Shipping from Hong Kong to Ohio took ten days. Looking around on the web, I’ve seen shipping times reported from seven to ten days, sometimes going up to as much as 20 days during the holiday season.

All eight boards look great. Other people who tried Itead reported some over-etching and silkscreen problems, but I don’t see any defects on mine. Since Itead now does 100% electrical testing, I have confidence that the boards will all work. I could spot the tiny dimple in each pad where the flying probes touched down, so it is clear that all eight boards were tested.

I went to the basement and heated up the soldering iron. The board went together easily. The 0.80 mm pitch of the AK5388 was downright easy to solder after the 0.50 mm A3PN250 FPGA and other fine-pitch parts I’ve been using at work. Besides, I’ve learned some new soldering techniques lately that helped me solder the AK5388 quickly, but I’ll have to share those in another post. I did use a meter to check all of my AK5388 solder joints, though. There were a few bridges, but they cleaned up without a problem.

The pads for the big electrolytic capacitors are larger than necessary. I used PCB’s default EIA7343 footprint. The pads had plenty of room for the soldering iron, but they could have been smaller without sacrificing ease of assembly. (Did I use the wrong footprint once again? 0805 capacitors seem to be the only ones I get along with…)

Lately Digi-Key has been taking much stronger steps to control moisture uptake by the semiconductors they sell. Instead of just shipping some cut tape in an anti-static baggie, they now seal the chips in an airtight bag with a packet of dessicant and a humidity indicator. I opened the bag this one was in about 4 weeks ago. Not bad so far, considering it was in my not-very-dry basement that whole time. Moisture uptake is important for reflow soldering techniques, but as far as I can tell, it is less significant for hand-soldering.

Now I’m left asking myself what comes next. In my original plan, the next step was to couple the ADC to the FPGA, put a USB core on the FPGA, and build a sound card. Once that works, adding a local oscillator and a quadrature mixer will make everything I need for a PC-based software-defined-radio (SDR) receiver, and this long trek will finally result in a radio.

However, I hear that the bands are great these days, and I’m not sure I want to take the time to homebrew an SDR rig just to get on the air. Maybe I should spend some time on a faster route to a radio, then come back to the SDR. I’ll probably have more on that idea next week.

Until then, keep on tinkering, and as always, your comments are welcome!

Trying out Itead Studios’s PCB prototyping service

I’m working on building a breakout board for the high-performance AK5388 audio ADC. In my last post, I revised the schematic to help with the PCB layout and test-fit the key components on a printout of the board.

The next step was to order the board. Laen’s PCB order is taking a hiatus this month. Feeling impatient, I decided to try one of the Chinese options: Seeed Studio’s or Itead Studio’s PCB fab services. They offer prices as low as $9.95 for 10 copies of a 5 cm x 5 cm board. Unfortunately, the ADC board is 4.9 cm x 6 cm. That extra centimeter nearly doubled the cost of the board, because I had to buy a 5 cm x 10 cm package. At least one dimension was still below 5 cm!

My son wandered in while I was comparing prices. He asked, “Is your circuit board going to be purple?” I told him that no, it was probably going to be green. “I think it should be red!” he said. “What the heck,” I thought, and clicked on the button for Itead’s color PCB service. The deal was $23 for 8 boards. That compares with $18 for 10 boards if they are green. Since both 8 and 10 boards are more than I need, it’s basically $5 extra for the custom color. I went for it.

For what it’s worth, one difference between Itead and Seeed is that Seeed only offers 50% electrical testing for their base prices, with 100% testing costing more. Itead has 100% e-test with their base prices. Itead and Seeed are having a bit of a price war over these PCB services, so their offers may well have changed by the time you read this.

Itead is offering an interesting bonus deal with their PCB services: PCB sharing. For a token 10 cents above the cost of the PCB service, they will send me two random boards from other designers. In exchange, they will send two additional copies of my board to other sharing participants. There is no guarantee the boards will be remotely useful to the recipient, but for 10 cents, how could I resist?

(By the way, if you’re reading this because you saw the skywired.net URL on a board Itead sent you, please drop me a note! I’d love to hear who you are and what you’re working on.)

I expected roughly a five day turnaround from Itead, and was disappointed when after five days, I received an e-mail that the fab had rejected my Gerber files. Itead wants the board outline on at least one Gerber layer. Now, both Laen and Sparkfun’s BatchPCB accepted the groundplanes on my boards as the outline, so I didn’t expect trouble from Itead. However, they were certainly within their rights to ask me for a correction. It was quick to add it, and a few hours later they told me my new Gerbers had been sent to the fab.

I’m still waiting for the PCBs, which were shipped Wednesday. Now I have to wait for them to come by airmail from Hong Kong. It’s hard to be patient!