Stefan Wagner's Development Board Adapter Is a Flexible Friend for Microcontroller Experimentation
With an onboard display, potentiometer, rotary encoder, buzzer, LEDs, buttons, and more, this clever PCB aims to speed MCU development.
Self-described microprocessor hobbyist Stefan Wagner has designed a carrier board that aims to make it easier toe experiment with new development boards — by allowing them to be easily and quickly wired into peripherals including capacitive buttons, a rotary encoder, and a compact OLED display.
"The development adapter simplifies experimenting with the various development boards," Wagner writes of his carrier board, designed for compact breadboard-friendly designs. "Simply plug in the board, connect the desired components using jumper cables, and you're good to go."
Those jumper cables are the secret to the carrier board's success: while there are plenty of compact microcontroller boards that will physically fit into the carrier board's female pin headers, they don't all have the same pins in the same places. The jumper wires allow the features of the carrier board to be directed where they need to go for each development board on test, without having to mess around with multiple carrier boards.
On the carrier board itself are a pair of capacitive touch pads, a rotary encoder, a potentiometer, three user-addressable single-color LEDs plus an eight-LED WS2812 addressable RGB strip, a piezoelectric buzzer, and a compact 0.96" 128×64 OLED panel display. The board also includes two electrically-erasable programmable read-only memory (EEPROM) chips, one on the I2C bus and one on the SPI bus, with a WCH Electronics CH340E offering a serial bus on a micro-USB port to the board's far edge.
Wagner has uploaded schematics and Gerber PCB production files for the carrier board to GitHub under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.