Kittenbot IObit part

[peacememories]

Hi everyone. I just created my first part, because I could not find it anywhere.
It’s the IObit from Kittenbot, a GPIO expansion for the BBc micro:bit. I based in on a design for the micro:bit itself that has been made available here.

There’s a few kinks, for example I would like to remove the extraneous power pins from the schematic, but maybe I’ll get around to that later.

Any feedback is of course very welcome

Kittenbot IObit_2.fzpz (106.0 KB)

[vanepp]

From a functional point of view pretty much perfect. The part looks and functions fine. There is a missing layerId in Breadboard and schematic has pins that are not on the .1in grid, and pcb should be suppressed as not necessary (this is already a breakout board you can’t mount it on a pcb!) Internally however it has problems. FritzingCheckPart produces about 5 pages of warnings and errors. The main issue is that you can not reuse pin number in the fzp file (which you are) each pin needs to exist in all active views (breadboard and schematic in this case.) I can’t point to something that will break with the current setup but I expect there will be very hard to find errors in routing or somewhere similar. I’m working on cleaning it up, but it will take some time.

Peter

[peacememories]

Thanks for taking the time to look over this
I’ll have to fix the layerid and grid, definitely.

The idea with keeping the pcb was that if you breadboarded a design with the iobit and then wanted to etch a pcb you could just put the microbit into the designed slot and connect a 5v supply and be ready

The aliased pin numbers are also part of that, because those pins exist on the breakout board but would not exist if you just wanted to connect a microbit to your board.

So maybe you’re right and the correct option is to just remove the pcb and get rid of the duplication that way.

There would still be some duplication in the schematic view, but I kind of find it weird to have 20 gnd pins in a schematic? Is there a way to make that cleaner and still correct, or should i just suck it up and create all those pins? (it wouldn’t be that bad, because honestly the breadboard view is the most important aspect of the part. if you didn’t care about the breakout board you’d just use the micro:bit part as is^^)

I would be very interested in your workflow. I’m using Inkscape and a text editor right now, and I didn’t even know FritzingCheckPart existed ^^’

Thanks again for checking this out

[peacememories]

Also, I made a slightly updated part with the micro:bit (using a Kittenbot case) inserted, so it’s clear what it is^^

Still the same internal problems though, I’m afraid

Kittenbot IObit with microbit.fzpz (77.6 KB)

[vanepp]

My usual workflow is documented here:

Part creation howto part 1 breadboard and pcb

Someone in this forum post requested help to fix up a part. So while doing that I decided to record what I needed to do in order to fix the part to provide a tutorial to create new / fix broken parts. If you start from the Tarjeta S4A EDU.fzpz file posted in the above thread, you should be able to recreate my improved part posted in the same thread. I started by loading the original part in to Fritzing, that indicates breadboard is (at first look anyway) pretty good, but schematic and pcb are…

FritzingCheckPart is in the testing section I think (there are about 9 sections)

@peacememories

There would still be some duplication in the schematic view, but I kind of find it weird to have 20 gnd pins in a schematic? Is there a way to make that cleaner and still correct, or should i just suck it up and create all those pins?

As far as I know they all have to exist for Fritzing internals to operate correctly. The usual method (and what I will use) is to overlay all the pins in the group on top of each other. It may be that your method will work, but I think it more likely that something is going to screw up internally in Fritzing when it comes across one of the duplicate pin numbers and that is going to be fairly difficult to diagnose when someone runs in to it. I’m part way through fixing up your part to a more standard format I should have a corrected part in a while.

Peter

[peacememories]

Overlaying them sounds like a good idea!

[vanepp]

OK here is a corrected part. I’m not sure what you did to schematic, I suspect you managed to rescale Y non symmetrical because I needed to rescale the svg in order to get the viewbox correct (it was too large in Y!) This part has pcb suppressed and pins for all connectors in both views (with duplicates in schematic overlaid on top of each other) and a test sketch that makes sure it is correct.

edit: Replaced the original part with a new one that adds the MicroBit to breadboard view! Redownload the new part if you have already downloaded the original (which didn’t have the MicroBit)

Kittenbot IObit_2-improved.fzpz (44.3 KB)

Kittenbot_IObit_2-test-Sketch.fzz (53.0 KB)

Peter