Guide

I have a doorbell camera in the UniFi Protect ecosystem. I wanted a way to show the doorbell stream on a low cost wall mounted display that integrates will with the existing home automations. I have a pair of these ESP32-S3 based screens, they are very common on aliexpress under the name “ESP32-S3 Development Board LVGL 4.0 inch 480*480 Smart Display”. I paid $40AUD or less for them. They consist of a front touch display connected to an ESP32-S3, with then an extra (optional) board that clips on the back that has a power supply and relay output. For my use case I generally dont use the relay so I can’t talk to how it performs. ...

The PineDIO unit. Modified to have external WiFi antenna for range. Setting up the PineDIO LoRaWAN gateway with TTN The PineDIO is a LoRaWAN gateway solution from Pine64. Announced on May 6th, these units have been slowly sent out to lucky early developers. It consists of a Pine64 A64-LTS SBC + an adapter hat to hold a RAK2287 module. The RAK2287 is a low-cost concentrator module that provides all of the LoRa goodness required for this unit to work. ...

The stupid state of JMicron drive interface IC’s If you have ever tried to use a USB3.0 hard drive enclosure based on a JMicron chipset with TrueNAS (formerly FreeNAS); you may have come across multipath errors or serial numbers that make no sense. Or simply SMART and TRIM not functioning. Additionally, you may have run into the stupid way these units power down the drives after 10 minutes of inactivity forcefully. Completely ignoring OS or HDD settings. This is infuriating if you want the drives to do what you tell them. ...

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. They offered some free PCB’s around the time I was writing part two, making it very convenient to use their services for this series of posts. ...

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. They have kindy offered to cover the cost of the production of these PCB’s before this series actually went live. They offered some free PCB’s around the time I was writing part two, making it very convient to use their services for this series of posts. ...

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. Please, please, do not just throw your entire schematic on one page, it makes for a highly unreadable schematic for anyone else who comes along. ...

Outline This is a half walkthrough / half hints guide to taking a base concept for a STM32 from idea to (somewhat) working hardware. The goal is to roughly document the path I use, but not bogging down into the details on things that are easier to google. For this series, I’m looking at designing out a small development board, designed to mount to the quite nice ILI9486 LCD unit. I’m designing this mostly so that its in a nicer form factor than other development boards, and so I can use USB-C as I really dislike USB mini-B. ...