Build a Board
We take you step by step through the process of designing and manufacturing a new breakout board product.
Lead Image © Dietmar Hoepfl, 123RF.com
We take you step by step through the process of designing and manufacturing a new breakout board product.
Building your own manufactured product, such as small surface-mount devices (SMDs) and printed circuit boards (PCBs), used to be extremely technically difficult. Getting the boards manufactured and shipped was even more complex. Now, however, multiple manufacturers in the US, Europe, and China will build and ship your boards to you, and you can do it all with PayPal and email.
In this article, I will go through the design and manufacturing of a new breakout board product from SwitchDoc Labs, the four-channel I2C mux board. If you want to build and manufacture your own product, you can do it!
Why do you need this? Is there a problem that your board will solve and a market for your board? To answer the question, you need to understand what an I2C bus does. An I2C (I-squared-C) bus is often used to communicate with chips or sensors that are on the same board or located physically close to the CPU. The I2C (Inter-Integrated Circuit) device bus was first developed by Philips (now NXP Semiconductors). To get around licensing issues, the bus is often called TWI (Two-Wire Interface). SMBus, developed by Intel, is a subset of I2C that defines the protocols more strictly. Modern I2C systems take policies and rules from SMBus, sometimes supporting both, with minimal reconfiguration needed. Both the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi support the I2C bus.
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Pages: 8
Price $15.99
(incl. VAT)