Check out these BrewPi Arduino shield PCBs :)

I just want to quickly share some photos of the boards for the BrewPi Arduino shield. I ordered them in yellow with white silk screen, how’s that for a beer board?

I ordered the boards from Hackvana, ran by Mitch Davis. Mitch is a great guy. He’s an Aussie who lives in Shenzhen, the electronics capital of China. I really recommend his PCB service, mostly for his excellent customer service and quality boards.You can order only a few boards or many. They can be shipped for free or with DHL, when you are always in a hurry like me. He can get you solder paste stencils too!

If you consider designing your own PCBs, or just want to talk about electronics, drop by on the IRC channel #hackvana on Freenode.

The boards are still in China, and these photos are actually taken by Mitch.

Features

Here is a list of some features and design choices for the shield:

• The board consists of the main Arduino shield and two break-away boards. The main shield connects to the LCD backpack with a 10 pin IDC connector. The rotary encoder breakout board connects to the LCD shield, which routes it to the main board.
• To save Arduino pins, the LCD is driven with a shift register.
• The pin mapping is chosen in such a way that the board will be compatible with both the Leonardo and the Uno.
• You can reconfigure some of the pins with solder jumpers, to free up i2c on the Leonardo, or SPI on the UNO.
• The HEAT and COOL outputs can be used for relays, SSRs or as digital output. The P-channel MOSFET can handle 150mA.
• There is a screw terminal to connect to your fridge door switch.
• There are two 3 pin MOLEX KK connectors for OneWire temperature sensors.
• Alternatively, you can use one 8-pin connector for all of the above.
• There is a buzzer for an alarm function.
• There is a large prototyping area, because I know you want to build your own expansions. All Arduino header rows have double rows, so you can easily connect a header pin to the proto area (the inner row will be unpopulated).

So, What’s next?

I am leaving for a snowboarding trip tomorrow morning, yay! I will get my hands on these boards when I get back. Then I will rewrite the AVR code to be compatible with these boards, with both the Arduino Leonardo and Arduino Uno.

You should be able to order these boards from me around the second week of January, with only SMD components assembled or fully assembled.

I will also try to offer SSRs, LCDs and waterproof DS18B20 temperature sensors, so you can order a complete kit in one go.