Hardware

As is relatively well known, both the Wii and Wii U have extremely limited power output on their USB ports. Nintendo appears to have limited these to exactly the 0.5A of USB 2.0. As the Disk drive in my Wii U has started to become intermittent at reading disks I went through rapidly backing these up to an external hard drive to prevent the device from effectively becoming a brick. However; using any external drives requires either a Y power splitter cable or externally powered drives....

Where we left off Part 1 covered the quick rundown of selecting the STM32 and assigning a rough pinout in STMCube. Part 2 provided a quick through the schematic capture process and PCB layout at a high level. Part 3 covered exporting the PCB for manufacture and a quick run through the ordering process with PCBWay. Disclaimer In this section, I’m using PCBWay for the ordering process example. They have kindly offered to cover the cost of the production of these PCB’s before this series actually went live....

H2O N2 - Water Cooling an Odroid N2 In mid-2018, I started to move all of my home server use and compute from an HP microserver G8 over to ARM-based SBC’s. This move was inspired initially as a power-saving exercise to save the idle power draw of the microserver (50-100W). The original setup consisted of an Odroid C1 running standard developer services and the microserver moving to just acting as a backup device that only powered on to handle backing up computers in the house....

Where we left off Part 1 covered the quick run down of selecting the STM32 and assigning a rough pinout in STMCube. Part 2 provided a quick through the schematic capture process and pcb layout at a high level. Part 3 here will cover the exporting the PCB for manufacture and a quick run through the ordering process with PCBWay. Disclaimer In this section I’m using PCBWay for the ordering process example....

Where we left off Part 1 covered the quick run down of selecting the STM32 and assigning a rough pinout in STMCube. Part 2 here will run through the schematic capture process and pcb layout at a high level. Schematic Capture I design exclusively in KiCad now, having completely moved off other platforms over the past few years. As such this guide will only cover KiCad related design work. I highly reccomend using hierarchical sheets in your design, to allow for both (some) reuse, as well as make the seperate building blocks clearly definied....