blue pill prototyping board with tft adapter

Guys,

I now have a prototyping board on eBay

http://m.ebay.co.uk/itm/192192445430?_mwBanner=1

I’m selling it for £19.50, I know its not as cheap as Chinese but I am only doing batches of 10 and only buying small numbers of parts.

There’s also a video on YouTube.https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zrMEeFS3sMk

I’d welcome suggestions and comments.

Steve

Nice!

Good to see the finished design. Its a pretty useful board, and since it breaks out an Arduino shield form factor, you can almost certainly use it with other shields in addition to the TFT.

The price is inevitably going to be a little bit more than the large volume boards, but it will probably pay for itself in reduced development time.

Is the kit fully assembled? If so, you might find that it sells better as an unassembled kit at a lower price. Also you might consider socketing the bluepill in any future design.

@Andy, yes its fully assembled. I’d probably still have to assemble the smd’s not everyone can do that. Also, I can guarantee it’s working if I assemble and test.

I could sell a cheaper one with sockets and no blue pill I suppose.

Maybe a power connector like the one in Arduino UNO.

interesting and nice shield!
with arduino like electronics, 3d printing etc, i think a different ‘market’ is evolving, niche market products like this rather than those mass produced products are becoming more prominent
even those ‘micropython’ boards which is basically stm32f405 dev boards possibly fall in this category. but of course given luck, it may scale to mass produced products
https://store.micropython.org/store/#/store

efftek wrote:…. I’d probably still have to assemble the smd’s not everyone can do that. Also, I can guarantee it’s working if I assemble and test.

ahull wrote:
Good point.. I guess a kit would probably need through hole regulators.

efftek wrote:I may just have to lie in the sun for two weeks and drink retsina!

zoomx wrote:Maybe a power connector like the one in Arduino UNO.

A power connector is useful if one use a power adapter (like me ), instead using batteries it’s better the connector that is already on the board, the little one with pins.
But it is my little experience.

Edit: you can also leave the traces and holes for the connector and leave the possibility to mount it to the customer.

I made something similar for my home projects, but using a Maple Mini instead of a BP as the CPU, and I only connect the pins on the display board for the display and touch screen and not the pins for the SD card.

Initially I had the display on the same side of the PCB as the Maple mini, but I then realised that I could put it on the back and save space, so did that in the next revision of the board.

I just relied on the voltage regulator on the Maple Mini, and so far I’ve not had any problems, but I should have probably included an external though hole regulator.

BTW.

I found this adaptor for the Teensy on PJRC’s site

https://www.pjrc.com/store/display_ili9341.html

It seems to be a cute minimal implementation, albeit doesn’t handle the SD card, or even the touch sensor.

It should be fairly simple to design a board like that for the BP but with the touch sensor connected as well, especially as the display which has the touch sensor has the same width of PCB