Original Products?

Support Product Questions
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Do you guys at core only buy in your components or do you also design them?

For example if i wanted an atmega32u4 on a pcb along with an esp32 with the ability to tie the uart pins altogether and a USB port?

And while it’s not an original product, your designs would be

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Hi Craig,

They do some real cool design work, there’s a great playlist on the Core YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPK2l9Knytg4Xdau4ECUjDv8dOhEWXYny

There isn’t anywhere on the website where you’re able to per-say buy consulting time or a PCB design service but the forum is a place where makers can help makers

For a design like that you could pretty easily whip it up in KiCAD if you spend a bit of time learning

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Also worth mentioning for others that come through the topic, the in-house made products have the ‘Original’ tag on them: Core Electronics Original Australia

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Yeah i was thinking i should probably learn how to use CAD lol, ive built maybe 40 projects with perfboard and i agree the novelty of building them by hand has worn off lol…

Maybe i’ll bite the bullet… take a dive into computer aided design and design one, the chinese have these modules called a bad beetle, i basically want it for 2 uses, a remote controlled device via wifi, and the 2nd the ability to configure applications on android

Eg having to type out a URL, ill just have the url saved …

But that’s just 1 idea of many …

Many many… lol

Thanks for the info!

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Screenshot_20220730-132253_eBay
Screenshot_20220730-132253_eBay1080×2220 259 KB

Basically this …

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Hi Craig,

We probably won’t be able to design that module as one of our original designs. It’s definitely a bit of a learning curve but it can be super rewarding to take the plunge into CAD PCB design. You can pretty much guarantee your first design will be a dud and won’t work, but you’ll learn a tonne and potentially unlock a whole new tier of DIY projects.

I can’t recommend any specific PCB fab house, but the usual Chinese places like PCBway and JLCPCB have been used by our staff and community members before with great results. In a lot of cases express posting the PCBs costs more than the actual custom PCB manufacture itself and the postage is the slowest part of the process.

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Cool, thanks for the heads up!

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I can also recommend KiCad 6.x as very good, completely free CAD software for designing circuit diagrams and PCBs. There are plenty of online tutorials to help you learn it, including both written tutorials and Youtube video tutorials. Be sure to use the inbuilt Design Rules Error-Checking tools on both your schematic and your PCB artwork to help you debug any errors in your work, before sending your PCB artwork for manufacture.

For PCB manufacture, I have used ourpcb.com.au several times with good results. Their office is in Melbourne and they own a factory in China. Thus their charge on a customer’s credit card is an Australian transaction. I upload my zipped files via their “Click & Buy” page.