At the beginning of 2020, a virus named COVID-19 swept China and within a few months, most countries suffered to varying degrees. During that miserable times, lots of makers created many meaningful projects with a desire to help fight back the COVID-19. This article will introduce 5 different kinds of projects made by our intelligent PCBWayers. You can also watch the video version below. 1. Coviclcok Coviclock is a protoboard for NodeMCU + ILI9341 display born during the Covid-19 pandemic, hence the name. The firmware is available on Github and is a great example of how to build an efficient table clock and calendar showing Time, Date, Temperature, and data taken from a remote CSV. Firmware shows Coronavirus data for a chosen Italian region. The clock is automatically set using an NTP server. A routine makes auto-adjustment for DST time. Board features also an active buzzer, actually used for giving an alarm when COVID-19 data are updated, and two tactile switches. Switches are not use...

In our daily SMT soldering operations, we often find that ENIG surface-treated boards are prone to two fatal problems: nickel corrosion and phosphorus-rich layers. Once such problems occur, they often cause a lot of batch solder joint reliability problems. Because these two types of problems are very concealed, the current reproduction is generally not easy to detect. Once found, most of them are too late. The damage and losses have already been caused and may not be able to make up. There are basically two main reasons why ENIG forms black pad: phosphorus-rich and nickel oxide. Phosphorus comes from the electroless nickel coating. In the subsequent gold and chemical nickel replacement process, because the phosphorus does not react, it will stay between the gold layer and the nickel layer to form a phosphorus-rich layer, and finally lead to the embrittlement results. Nickel oxide is basically composed of the complex NixOy chemical formula (x and y are numbers). The fundamental reason i...

Hi PCBWayers, Here we are announcing the winners of PCBWay 3 rd  PCB Design Contest. After more than half a year, we finally see this exciting moment. Thank you, all the participants for their active participation, we have seen many excellent PCB designs and advanced ideas this year. Thank you, all the judges for their participation, so that our contest can be completed with fair and professional scoring. Your participation is our PCBWay’s great honor. The Best Designs 1st Prize: Axiom: 100kW motor controller     Award: $1,000 in cash + 10,000 PCBWay Beans + Sponsored Gifts (Imou Cue 2 camera+$500 free Ponoko laser cutting coupon)+ Startup Service (Bring the product to market and sell it in PCBWayer Bazaar) Winner Interview Judge’s Comments:  “This IGBT motor control board is a professional grade control product for electric vehicles, complete with liquid cooling and CAN bus to integrate into any new small to mid-sized experimental electric vehicle. The documen...

As an embedded-development company focused on various electronic devices, from IoT to industrial automation & robotics, Factorial Group, develops a new expansion dock for the Onion Omega2+development board. Providing all of the interfaces your various modules, sensors, and USB devices might require, it can easily connect modules, sensors, and USB devices to Omega2. Without the need for additional breadboards or soldering, it can access SPI, I2S, I2C, UART, USB 2.0, and Ethernet.To fulfill it’s functions, just slot the Omega2+ into the expansion dock and use it like any other single-board computer. Why create the Omega2+expansion dock? A lack of full-featured Omega2+ development boards — in order to get the full set of peripherals we need, we’ve had to use several different off-the-shelf boards and modules at the same time The high cost and inconvenience of designing and manufacturing a custom development board lEven with a custom board, connecting a large number of modules and sens...