I am an electronics engineer, employed by a local company, designing very cool stuff. But on occasion I have an itch that has to be scratched, and the only way to scratch that itch is to design some little bit of electronics.
This occasionally-updated blog will have information about these little designs. Right now, I don’t know whether the designs will be fully open source or what. I may decide to make the designs available as kits, or perhaps just make PCBs available for purchase. It all depends on the time I have available.
What you might find interesting is that I do as much of the design work on Mac OS X, not Windows or Linux. (There are exceptions, which will be noted when I get to them.)
For the physical designs (schematics and PCB layout), I have been successfully using the open-source Kicad suite. I have been building the tools from the main Kicad bazaar “product” branch, but there are a couple of developers working on the creation of OS X binaries. I will post links to those binaries as they become available (which should be any day now).
For 8051 microcontroller design and development, I greatly prefer the Silicon Labs devices. They are inexpensive, they can be programmed in-circuit with a $39 dongle, and they work as advertised. SiLabs also offers excellent support, and they provide free software tools. Their Eclipse-based Simplicity Studio runs on OS X, Linux and Windows and it’s pretty good.
That’s all for now. More to come …