PCBs, Kits, Maker Faire, and Web Services

First things first – an apology for the radio silence recently! We’ve been hard at work on exams, but those are finished now, so we can get back to this. There are 3 things to tell you about now, so in no particular order:

PCBs

After 2 prototype runs, the one and only Taylor Jones has finished up the the fifth glorious revision of the PCBs, and they look and work beautifully. Some cool updates from the previous version:

• Fixed the ADC connections (this is what caused the last version to fail spectacularly with the analogue sensors)
• Rounded corners – Nice and friendly to feel when picking them up now!
• Allocated more space for the footprints for the BMP085
• Labeled the two LEDs “red” and “green” on the board silkscreen for easy installation into the board
• Added a little plus so it’s possible to tell which way in the UVI-01 sensor goes.

So with no further ado, here are the files for your perusal:

Eagle Board File for ordering from OSHPark or editing: here

Gerber Files for those ordering from other PCB fabs: here

All of these files are under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 license, so if you wanna make changes, knock yourself out!

Maker Faire & Kits!

We’ve ordered the components (and all have arrived, except for the PCBs which are due on 1st July) for 20 AirPi kits, pictured at the top of this post! We’ll be selling these at the Mini Maker Faire Elephant & Castle on the 6th July, so come along and say hi!

The contents of these kits is as follows:

• Official AirPi PCB (the one we posted above)
• BMP085 Pressure/Temp sensor breakout board
• DHT22 Pressure/Humidity sensor
• MiCS-5525 Carbon Monoxide sensor
• MiCS-2710 Nitrogen Dioxide sensor
• UVI-01 UV sensor
• LDR sensor
• 2 LEDs – 1 red, 1 green
• All the chips you need to get the sensors working – ADC and an Op-Amp (we picked out a really nice rail-to-rail one!)
• The header for connecting the shield to your Raspberry Pi
• All the resistors and capacitors you need to make the sensors above work
• Printed instructions on how to solder everything together

We’re not including the TGS2600 sensor because it was by far the most expensive, and also the provided the least useful data. However there is a footprint for it on the board if you want to buy one and solder it in! There is also space for Adafruit’s Ultimate GPS breakout if you want to hook that up as well.

If you can’t solder, we’ll put a kit together for you for a small fee, and if we have any left over you should be able to buy them from cottonpickers website! If you really wanna get hold of one but can’t make it to the faire, shoot us a message and if demand is high enough we might buy another batchload of components for kits.

Web Services

The response since Cosm shut down and was replaced by the fairly-commerical Xively has been amazing. We’ve had people from all over the world offering to host our data and help us – thank you so much. We’re currently looking at our options and once we’ve got something set in stone (we will have before the maker faire) we’ll put out another blog post.

Thanks for all your support, and KEEP MAKING!