DIY dimmer for modern skilled hands

Do you want to assemble a DIY dimmer, but there is no desire / opportunity to mess around with self etching of printed circuit boards? Complaining under the cut you learn to "make" the same beautiful board. Ready ZIP-archive for order at the Chinese production is waiting for you inside.

For new ones - the previous series of our "series": first , second , third , fourth . This is already the fifth.

The goal of our "iron quest" is slowly transformed into the creation of a hardware platform, the most accessible for repetition. The first difficulty in the way of such repetition - the manufacture of printed circuit boards. In the modern world, this difficulty is easily overcome. In China, it is very inexpensive to order the production of printed circuit boards in prototype volumes. That is, in quantities of ten pieces. Prices at the same time (for the size of 5x5 cm. And circulation of 10 pieces) start at just $ 10 + shipping.
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Supplier selection

At least two manufacturers of such boards with a good reputation have long been known. This is SeeedStudio and ITEAD STUDIO. Under the requirements of one of them, an archive with gerberas was made, offered today to your attention.

We ordered prototypes from two suppliers - from the well-known ITEAD STUDIO and from a HQEW just found by the search. The total price tag, including delivery to Russia, from the first supplier was $ 13.80, from the second - $ 15.77. When ordering such a lot with SeeedStudio, the price tag would be $ 18.70.

The second supplier was chosen simply to compare the result and this choice has already begun to give profit. Strangely enough, it happened to start a Skype chat with a pretty representative of this company. In the course of communication, they agreed to photograph the board before sending it to us. So we did not have to wait a month (or even more) until our glorious post worked out to see the correctness of the manufacture of boards according to our documentation.

We deliberately (and free of charge) indicated direct links to the order pages of the boards in the specified offices. Even the most unprepared reader will be able to repeat a few simple steps and get after a while by mail a dozen wonderful cards, to which the hand with the already hot soldering iron stretches.

By the way, when ordering for ITEAD STUDIO, we can say that the open source board and get in the end not ten, but twelve copies for the same price. For some cosmic reasons, we forgot to specify this option. Do not repeat our mistakes.

Order process

Order order is different from different suppliers. Of the two tested personally, we liked the ordering process from HQEW more.

We enter the parameters of the order (we use all the options by default, we enter only the size of the board: 4 x 4.5 cm, the quantity is 10 pieces), click “Calculate”, we see the price of $ 10.62 for production and $ 47.45 for delivery using DHL. Expensive Click on the down arrow next to DHL, select Russian Federation from the list and switch to the delivery to Sweden Post for $ 5.15. In the next step, enter the delivery address, upload a ZIP file with gerberas and ...

... And we receive a notification that our order went to the audit department to check the suitability of our files for production. You will have to pay later, after a successful audit. This is great happy. The world is full of stories, how Russian enterprises sent motherboards to production without checking source codes, drilled holes in the wrong places, mirrored the sides of boards, and so on.

Both the audit and the subsequent production take place rather quickly, here is the time log of the beginning of our order:

2013-10-30 18:12:51 Order Service submitted.
2013-10-31 01:54:21 Audit passed, please arrange payment within 72 hours, or the order will be canceled automatically.
2013-10-31 02:43:18 Payment done and factory prepare to produce.
2013-10-31 08:56:59 Goods are under proceeding.
2013-11-04 04:10:34 Goods have been finished for internatinal Logistics zone for shipping.

The ordering process in ITEAD STUDIO is more hardcore. We make an order, pay before sending them gerberas. In the end, after payment, we have an order number. We write a letter specifying this number in the title and attaching your treasured file. And silently waiting for the result.

Our order was placed 10/30/2013, today 11/05/2013 we received a notification that everything was done and sent. The track number indicates that the package will leave Hong Kong. This is good, because with the departures from this country in recent times unexpected happenings sometimes occur. It happens that the parcels from there reach the recipients in Russia in just a couple of weeks instead of the usual one and a half months.

What's next?

The project is slowly developing, overgrown, though small, but by an army of supporters. We have created a (still empty) VKontakte group to assess interest in our project. Do not let it remain empty if we could touch your soul with something.

When there is a fee, you need to solder something on it. Wait for the post about the specifications of this something, with the appearance of the elements and possible replacement options.

One fee will not be full. In the near future at least one case version will be available for the dimmer. In the form of a model for printing on a 3D-printer. We can now test printing on at least two different printers and be sure to tell you about our experience.

The development of a USB module for our system is coming to an end. It will be a board with two types of sockets, under two possible form factors of radio modules. The FT232-based module will be used to control from the computer the home radio network + for programming new “empty” radio modules. His sketch and archive with gerberas will be presented in one of our next "series".