Projects

Printed Circuit Board Layout Tool

PCB is a tool for the layout of printed circuit boards. PCB can produce industry standard RS-274-X and Excellon NC-Drill format output for submission to board manufacturers.

gerbv -- a Gerber (RS-274X) viewer

Gerbv is an open source Gerber file (RS-274X only) viewer. Gerbv lets you load several files on top of each other, do measurements on the displayed image, etc. Besides viewing Gerbers, you may also view Excellon drill files as well as pick-place file

USBWafer

USBWafer is a small Free Software and Free Hardware USB dongle for various purposes.

cnc-milling-machine

The CNC PCB Milling Machine project is the complete specifications for the software and hardware for a complete light duty Computer and Numerical Control (CNC) milling machine designed primarily to mill isolation traces in copper clad printed circuit board material. Additionally, it can handle ... [More] milling of soft materials such as plastics and aluminum. This entire project is now open source. This includes the design of the physical machine itself (most of which I owe to many other excellent sources), the design of the electronic motor driver circuit, the PIC assembly source code for the firmware embedded in the driver circuit, and the Java source code for the GUI based application that runs the machine. I am very much a junk box designer. The primary selection criteria from most of the hardware that makes up this project was what I already had on-hand or could obtain cheaply form local resources and EBay. The design of the physical machine was limited by what I could do with a limited set of power woodworking tools (Table Saw, small Drill Press, Router and Router Table, and Power Miter saw). There is practically nothing in the physical design of the machine itself that did not come from one of the many excellent references sources I found via a never-ending series of Google searches. The software is my own design, influenced heavily by the ideas of many others that had done similar projects in the past. It is not the best example of my Java development work, but I am proud of it just the same. Currently, the software works only with my machine microcode. It does not generate any G-Code output or convert between formats, but it certainly could go that direction. There is a simulated machine mode that can work without a connection to the microcode. It will do the displays and generate the isolation traces, etc. Modifications to output G-Code (or any other protocol) would not be terribly hard to do, and could be fit into the project nicely. [Less]

Absolum

Absolum is an Electronic Design Automation (EDA) Suite for Robotic and Electronic Gadget Development.

Edacious

Electronics design automation (EDA) suite for design of electronic circuits and systems, simulation (through physical / semi-empirical methods) and PCB layout/fabrication tools. Includes a GUI interface (Agar-based), Unix-style command-line interfaces and a simple-to-use C API.

OpenDIMM

The OpenDIMM project aims to create Open Hardware RAM DIMMs.

openbiosprog

openbiosprog is a fully Open Hardware and Free Software programmer for BIOS chips. The first version will support Low Pin Count (LPC) chips, later versions might add support for parallel flash chips and SPI chips.

openbiosprog-spi

openbiosprog-spi is a fully Open Hardware and Free Software USB-based programmer for SPI chips, e.g. those used as BIOS chip in recent mainboards. The user-space source code is part of flashrom (GPL, version 2), the schematics and PCB layouts are licensed under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license and were ... [More] created using the open-source Kicad EDA suite (GPL, version 2). [Less]

NGerber

NGerber is a small class library that allows .NET applications to easily write Gerber files (commonly used for EDA to specify circuit board layouts). Gerber files created with this library are compatible with the RS-274-X standard.