Front side of the PCB. The back side has labels for the components as well.
My first PCBs arrived in early December, but due to the holidays I haven’t done anything with them yet. I just wanted to show what they look like.
There are 5 small boards attached to my PCB:
- An FTDI Basic from Sparkfun for connecting a USB cable to my Linux box for programming the microcontroller
- An Arduino Mini-Pro board
- A RTC clock board
- A tiny color display board
- An ESP8266 board
There is also a small USB connector for power. I don’t have to use a real USB connector for this. I just needed the power and ground points from a USB part for Fritzing to not complain about unclosed loops in the PCB layout. I’ll wire this directly to a power converter that takes 110V input and drops it to 5V output. That way I can use the same power input used for the outlets in this project to power the PCB (and relays, for that matter).
Not all of these have to be connected. I could just use the pinouts for them and wire them manually. For example, I’ll probably just add L-shaped male headers to the board for the FTDI Basic. It doesn’t have to be installed for the board to work.