Reasons for designing my own board.

Home Page>

A number of perfectly good boards are available commercially, ready to use for applications. All that would be needed to use these as a trainer in Electronic Products classes, would be some suitable input and output devices for the boards to connect to. The price of such boards is not outrageously high, and some - such as the PICAXE boards - are quite reasonably priced. It was not price which prompted me to design my own board. I wanted the students to build the whole thing - including producing the PCB. In addition, I wanted them to see that a very small number of additional components are needed to get something useful from a PIC chip.

As we have facilities for etching PCBs and more recently using a laser cutter to produce the PCBs, it made sense to design my own. I used the basic information given on the Revolution Education site to design the simplest board possible. No buffers, no reverse connection protection, just the inputs, outputs, power and PIC chip.

Next page>

Mike’s CYBOT page might be interesting if you want to do control stuff like robots. There’s some good techie stuff if you work through the buttons on the side of his site. Click the graphic to go there.