One of the step changes in electronic construction at our level over the last ten or fifteen years has been the availability of cheap high-quality printed circuit boards. What used to cost hundreds of dollars is now essentially an impulse buy, allowing the most intricate of devices to be easily worked with. Many of us have put away our etching baths for good, often with a sigh of relief.
We’re pleased that [Riyas] hasn’t though, because they’ve etched an STM32 dev board that if we didn’t know otherwise we’d swear had been produced professionally. It sports a 176-pin variant of an STM32F4 on a single-sided board, seemingly without the annoying extra copper or lack-of-copper that we remember from home etching. We applaud the etching skill that went into it, and we’ll ignore the one or two boards that didn’t go entirely to plan. A coat of green solder mask and some tinning, and it looks for all the world as though it might have emerged from a commercial plant. All the board files are available to download along with firmware samples should you wish to try making one yourself, though we won’t blame you for ordering it from a board house instead.
It’s always nice to see that single board computers are not the sole preserve of manufacturers. If the RC2014 Micro doesn’t isn’t quite your style, there’s always the Blueberry Pi which features a considerably higher penguin quotient.
