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About project. History and creation reasons

A project log for PCB Assembly Desktop Factory

Creation of ready-made low-budget infrastructure for developing, manufacturing, and adjusting electronic devices

teardownitteardownit 11/13/2023 at 06:100 Comments

The project was created by accident at the moment of urgent need for a mobile standalone device for ISP programming and testing a lot of printed circuit boards with controllers and FPGAs. The task was quickly solved on a Raspberry by assembling a small IDC-10 socket adapter with a button and LEDs on a breadboard and installing OpenOCD and xc3sprog packages.

It became a solution, after which any thoughts about buying or upgrading another programmer just disappeared. In fact, if you have been working with programmable devices for a long time, you can surely find a whole museum of such devices for flashing (I have a whole drawer of them on my nightstand) - ByteBlaster, Segger, (maybe even several), ST-Link, etc., but there are many of them! These devices are built for LPT, COM, USB... lots of different ones, but here's the trouble - many are already old, unsupported, and incompatible. We'll have many more other reasons to finally buy a new one already. You know? And instead of all this happiness!

The advent of small and low-cost Linux microcomputers with GPIOs has allowed desktop applications to access external devices without special adapters, dongles, etc., leaving only electrical matching necessary.

Many projects immediately used this opportunity but also immediately raised the problem of unification on the use of GPIO (lack of unification). And this requires a solution.

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