Tricked-out Blue Pill

I ordered 10 of these things back in the summer on AliExpress as a special 10x deal with free shipping. I also ordered a bunch of other stuff from the dealer, it all got shipped in a nice little cardboard box wrapped with tape … err, no… it was laminated with tape. In any event, it got to Atlanta in a few weeks later all postage free.

I have been playing exclusively with the Maple Mini clone and I still love that board. But the BP was very cheap. After getting the boards, I removed one from the antistatic bag and threw a blink sketch at it. Worked first time. And I forgot about it for a few weeks.

This past week, I wanted to do some more testing but I had not even soldered the pins on the board – so, it would not plug into my ProtoBoard. So, I soldered the pins … like, they were free in the bag with the board. Then I got to thinking that maybe it would be fun to add a few more connections to make prototyping easier. I have done that many times with bareboard atmega328P-PU boards. And so I added a few finishing touches: pin headers, nail-polish colors of red/green for Vcc and Gnd and white/yellow for Rx/Tx. I removed the J0 jumper that must be moved for programming and replaced it with a jumper that has a long tab so that I could grasp it easily.

The last thing I did was use some serious UV adheasive on the USB connector … covering it liberally and zapping it with my UV laser. If that puppy decides to come off, the top board laminate will come too. If you never used UV adheasive, buy some … you will be amazed at the uses. It does not “gas” like superglue, either.

Nothing else to say except show a few pixs:

DSCF2022 by Rayburne, on Flickr

DSCF2019 by Rayburne, on Flickr

DSCF2023 by Rayburne, on Flickr

Ray

Thanks Ray.

I will put UV epoxy on my shopping list, and a UV LED laser. (I have a UV laser but it’s 100W and it’s for engraving and cutting – and would be impractical for curing glue

Have you considered putting the header pins, in to the top of the board, rather than using headers.

I only have female to female DuPont connectors, and those male to male wires, so I find headers hard to work with.

I will also buy some male to female DuPont connectors as they will come in handy.

Are those extra long pins on that? If so, do you have a link to that vendor/item on aliexpress? Looks like you using the UART serial loader to program that?

Rick Kimball wrote:Are those extra long pins on that? If so, do you have a link to that vendor/item on aliexpress? Looks like you using the UART serial loader to program that?

RogerClark wrote:
I will put UV epoxy on my shopping list, and a UV LED laser.
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RogerClark wrote:Thanks Ray.
I will put UV epoxy on my shopping list, and a UV LED laser.

Thanks Ray

Unfortunately Amazon don’t have a presence in Australia (apart from a bookshop), so I’ll need to find the same thing on AliExpress or eBay

(Ordering from Amazon.com gets expensive because of the shipping etc)

Interesting that you are using the female pin rows. Personally, I avoid them since I got many times lousy connections (maybe caused by the bad male jumper wires you can buy for cheap) and was searching hours before recognized the failure.

madias wrote:Interesting that you are using the female pin rows. Personally, I avoid them since I got many times lousy connections (maybe caused by the bad male jumper wires you can buy for cheap) and was searching hours before recognized the failure.

fredbox wrote:RogerClark wrote:Thanks Ray.
I will put UV epoxy on my shopping list, and a UV LED laser.

Here is why the female headers are on-top…

An ESP8266 done in a similar way: