 So we're here at the Lenara connect and who are you? Hi, my name is Michael Welling. I am the founder owner operator of already embedded design Just where do you embedded design? This is your company. Yes. What do you do? I do contractual design engineering board support for various arm and Other processor architectures. So you have all these you do PCB design? All kinds of custom special PCB design projects, right? Yes, I do I actually do a lot of contractual PCB design, but the boards that I'm going to show off today are actually open hardware so right here for example Open hardware that means those are four projects that are kind of like open source community is stuff that has to do with the narrow Well, none of these well the ones that are directly related to the Lenaro are the 96 boards mezzanine cards So this guy here is a Nile mezzanine that was developed by one of the students from Brazil That we're working together with I hand assembled this guy At home to prove out an Altium template that we created. So the bottom side is the important side actually the pin layout and Connector spacing was a verified with this board and now that template is ready for other people to use to create new designs from the Altium template and we have a key cad template and we're working on getting a Eagle template as well. So what is special about this backside here? This is the thing that are rooted around. Well, the connector spacing is important for the 96 boards specification, so The 96 board CE spec requires the the high speed connector here and the low speed connector here to have a certain Spacing and we just needed to verify that essentially this what board otherwise is pretty uninteresting. It has few LEDs and switches All right. What kind of other projects that you working on here? Well, we have here. This one is the Quite an old board actually I I created this in 2015 when 96 boards was Early on and this is a robotics controller That is based on the the same specification as the other board Yes, what is that? Yes, it plugs into the the dragon board and The plugs into the top of the the 96 board CE spec compliant boards, so 960 all the new boards and then it has all these Connectors for robotics. Yes, actually these along the edges There are servo headers and GPIO headers. This board needs to be revised Actually, because these these headers actually contend with connectors that are below. So I'm probably going to eventually do a revision of this board that is a little a little more Conducive to the spec now. It just has a there's a 9 DOF IMU in the middle here that little tiny chip We have here is it is what we're using to drive the good the servos. So this is a PWM controller And these guys over here are just level translators Ford I squared C and GPIO which come out to headers here So the the thing with 96 boards is it's 1.8 volt I owe so a lot of the Hobbies and off-the-shelf stuff runs on five or three point three. So you typically have to level translate to talk to them Where are you based? I'm actually based out of Carbondale, Illinois currently Not really well known but isn't near Chicago It's actually on the opposite side of the state from Chicago But you know everything in Illinois is close to Chicago according to most so it's a Next-state what's the next state blow there? You got Missouri, which is actually we're close to the St. Louis and You know Kentucky and Tennessee. So you able to just design all these PCBs. How do you do that? I use most of my design is actually done all the open hardware design is done in key cat. So I use Do you have you haven't running on your laptop? I do have key cat running on my laptop So key cat is an open source platform for Designing print circuit boards and in this recently Added a lot of support for Newer features that they're important for a higher speed design, but this it's been around for a while and Let's look at the beagle logic. This is actually a project that someone else did but I helped do a A designer so do you kind of like load it? Yep, and there this is an unrouted version So this is it this is actually early version of the board, but that's not a design I've actually done. This is another open hardware project that I was doing designer So you design the stuff like this. Yes. Well at first you start with schematic and you capture the the components in schematic form Oh Well, this project isn't great for demonstrating. Let's see if I get another one Okay, there it is. So you have schematics and then from the schematics the wiring for each of the You know, the different components is laid out all the passes and ICs and everything's in there Yeah, and then you come a little bit closer to the screen so I can hear it. Just know it'll sit a little bit closer Yeah, okay, so the The components are are wired in in schematic form in schematic form and then from there you take that and you import it into into the PCB and This is just a kind of a graphical representation of how they're gonna be interconnected and then on the PCB it's actually what it's physically gonna look like when it's done and You place the components on the board and you route the traces between the components based on the schematic and You see this is actually partially routed but this is this is just a for an earlier version of a board that's actually Coming out from it another engineer that I Did the review for so so you did the design in that Application and then you get it printed by somebody or somebody makes it right right. Where do you get that done? Actually a lot of these boards you see how they're all purple This and we have a lot of the majority of boards are green actually and green is actually the easiest solder mask Which is the color of the board to apply, but the purple the purple boards are actually from OSH park which they actually sponsor My open hardware designs, so they actually provide the boards for free for me so that I can continue to Support the open hardware community with my boards Yeah, and you have something running here with the risks five in you doing something special This is the low five board actually yeah sure I can hold it the low five is a Risk five microcontroller the one of the first of its kind first open hardware silicon, I guess they call it and This board pretty much takes another Reference design and strips back some of the extra components and breaks it out into a bread breadboard friendly form factor So you have a serial flash the the microcontroller here that little guy And a reset button and then you know some a few passives and the crystal oscillator or the crystal is over here The little guy it's hard to point to him because they're so small this board actually plugs into a standard breadboard and This is a risk five which risk five is there Well, this is the FE 310 which is the the microcontroller spec There's a higher end FE 500 series, I believe and I'm actually going to visit the sci-fi Headquarters tomorrow to talk to the guys about their different products and Work with them possibly in the future. We'll see and you have a crowdfunding going on with this, right? Yes, I do actually the the little five is on is on group gets So I made them available to the to the general public $25. Yes, that's it and there's 192% funded you you needed the we did a minimum of a hundred boards and We got a hundred ninety two on order Nice, and it's still it's still going. Yes. We have 11 days left on that and when are you gonna shift? After the 11 days is up. We have to have them assembled and they should be out like in a month time frame somewhere in there and So the people are excited about this at the community around the risk five, right? Yeah, the and the general open hardware community as well all right and And these right here. This is using the new octava systems SIP right. Yes. Is it what the big old board big old bone blue is using? Yes, the big one blue uses the SIP System and package octava systems took the took the the So see from the beagle bone black and then they added the the DDR and the power management IC and they put it all inside of this one package So that it makes it a lot easier for new board designers to come up and and develop without having to worry about the high-speed layout of the DR and all the internal passives and What have you so on you'll notice that this board is actually single-sided Which is not typically possible with your standard SOC because you'll usually have a whole bunch of passives on the bottom So they they really free up the bottom side of the board and they make the routing a lot easier for the design engineer So and what do you do about this? What do you mean? What do you do with this kind of chipset? Okay, so projects you have going this particular Project was just kind of it was kind of handed off for me our to me from Jason Kreidner of the beagle board org foundation He did in the initial design in Eagle and then I converted it to key cad and fixed up some little design boo-boos and this kind of proved out that Hey, we can make this this board run Linux and fit into a Smalls mint tin very small board smaller than the Raspberry Pi zero actually So that that was the precursor to what now just recently launched is the pocket Beagle and you actually these are actually on for sale Last week launching at Maker Faire, New York Pocket beagle. Yeah, so they actually Octavo went ahead and made the the chip even smaller For us and this is much smaller. Is it like half or something is I think 60% Yeah, so this this chip has got all the same features as the bigger chip actually it has a little bit more It has an e-prom embedded in as it well. So the the board actually Also singles single-sided very simple the added to benefit with this board is that it breaks out a lot of I owe on these two headers that are out on the side here I didn't actually do the design on this board. It was done by GHI But I did do a key cat conversion So that we have both key cat and eagle versions of the design Out on github so you can actually download the the design files and make your own derivatives Cool, that's awesome. So what are you gonna do in the future? And are you excited with Leonardo and all the potential of stuff? You you talking about mezzanine and all kinds of projects. Yes, actually, I'm I'm heading up a community mezzanine initiative So that we can actually develop more mezzanine products for the 96 boards What I try to do is kind of enable people to get started pretty quickly. So I made a I augmented the key cat template to add the the high speed connector on the bottom and this is actually all to all based on the Altium template, but What what I'm working on now is a GPS mezzanine and in the future we're gonna probably have an iSquad S audio mezzanine and We're trying to make it so that the the boards are actually compliant with all of the 96 board CE spec whereas with the this particular board this is from aero are designed by seed or somebody from Qualcomm actually but they're manufactured by seed but It uses features that are only on the dragon board 410c to do audio so the audio mezzanine Actually has a special header that connects to the base board which other 96 board CE don't have so I guess I should show you the header So this is the header that's specific to the dragon board and that allows audio to come out to the top and Only works on the on the dragon board actually But the iSquad S mezzanine coming out pretty soon will have the audio Driven with iSquad S which is part of this spec That comes through the low speed header and the the stuff you're doing is uh Is the kind of like the big point about the 96 boards the The ecosystem that the idea is to have with the mezzanine boards and all that stuff and you You're working in that direction. You're helping you're helping that that the community Yes, I'm trying to boost the ecosystem a little bit There there has been a fair amount of work A lot with aero and other you know constituents to the project, but I'm trying to get more community members involved and by providing the templates and reference designs we can actually Mix and match and make new designs a lot more quickly and using With the key cat template you can do it all with open source. So pretty cool