Category: Electronics

This is a general purpose PCB that I designed in KiCad as a helper board for my Manhattan-style mounted RF projects. A link to the first version is here, but the text is in romanian. The original idea came to me after getting tired of using perf boards and bread-boarding for my prototypes. I wanted …

A timelapse of Fusion360 design of the case of the 101dB attenuator project.

Another one in KiCad 7.0. I work on a project these days and I face all kind of weird stuff in KiCad 7.0. While running DRC in PCB editor, I ran into a „Footprint [whatever footprint] does not match copy in library [whatever library]” warning: This seems to be related whenever the 3D file is …

A lot of microscopic tracks that needed to be cleaned up in your KiCad PCB project might end up messing with your DRC report: You just need to select and delete the culprit, then DRC gets cleared: Hope this helps. Greetings !

I needed this 3D design for a mini N connector that I have in my shack but I was unable to find any 3d file (.STEP etc) online. The connectors are used for my 101dB attenuator project. Enjoy ! Greetings.

KiCad templates for two different hat models for Orange Pi Zero boards can be downloaded from my GitHub repo. Two different KiCad templates can be downloaded in the same GitHub archive: one uncut, 46×48 mm exactly same size as Orange Pi Zero; the other one has some cuts for network and USB connector, to accomodate …

I was quite busy the other day trying to understand how Baofeng is using RDA1846 transceiver in their products. While analyzing the schematic it struck me the overcomplicated way they do the switch between UHF and VHF. This is an excerpt of the schematic: The entire selector block is made up with discrete components ! …

My first finished KiCad project is a prototype of a RF Power meter with input attenuation built around an Analog Device AD8307. An excellent tutorial about log amps can be read in March 1999 edition of Analog Dialogue. KiCad PCB: And the 3D rendering of the same PCB: The next step will be PCB ordering, …

I’ve been quite busy lately and neglected the blog. I enrolled on Coursera for a very interesting FPGA course, in what seems to be a FPGA specialization from University of Colorado Boulder. I have always had somewhat a reserved attitude towards FPGAs mainly because I believed that these are hard to understand and need a …

Encouraged by the latest developments, today I started building a new application that will  allow remote connection to Kenwood TH-D74, remote control and APRS data transfer. However, while building and running the app I got the following error: If you encounter this, be aware that it is generated by application sandboxing. You can think of using …