HOPPVALS-MRF-01
Been learning electronic PCB design the last few weeks while retrofitting some IKEA window shades for Zigbee enabled motorization. I've really enjoyed the journey of 3D printing and being able to create all kinds of mechanically useful things over the last few years, but I had always wanted to go even further and incorporate some non-trivial custom electronics. For this project I had a space constraint for the motor controller board, so while I could have probably hacked together a working perfboard, it just wasn't going to be satisfying. So I finally took the plunge and spent 40 or so hours in KiCad learning how read IC reference documents, picking components, and of course, doing the PCB trace layout. It's really just a 12v→5v buck circuit, all the plumbing and ancillary components for connecting a ESP32 module to a couple motor driver ICs, and some headers, but it is completely mine! Just got 5 of my boards in the mail from JLCPCB the other day (insane turnaround, less than a week) and was very happy to find that the entire circuit worked perfectly! I did spend a fair amount of time going over the design with Claude though, so I think that paid off (the kicad files are plaintext, so it made easy work of understanding what I was doing). Still putting together the repo here, but I'm hoping to make a little blog post out of the project too :) https://github.com/evanpurkhiser/HOPPVALS-MRF-01