Thats a wrap It's that festive time of year when goodies arrive from PCBWay, and what a delightful surprise to receive the Partner of the Year award! A huge thanks to PCBWay, my Patreons, and GitHub sponsors for the amazing support. This year has been thrilling, starting with ESP32 projects and diving into nickel plating experiments. I'm particularly excited about the ESP32 Rainbow project, now fully funded and gearing up for a 2025 release. With lots planned for the coming year, here's to a Merry Christmas and an exciting New Year ahead! 23 December 2024
Making hard pcbs at home In my latest DIY adventure, I explored nickel plating to harden PCBs at home. I was inspired by a slick resistor box design I found through EEVBlog, which had an incredibly cool switching technique but left the PCBs vulnerable to wear from contact scraping. Despite some initial mix-ups and challenges—like dealing with steel instead of pure nickel, using the wrong voltage, and dealing with contamination—my experiments led to some promising results. I even compared the scratch resistance of plated vs. original PCBs in a very informal test. I wrapped up by sharing some handy links for anyone eager to dive... 16 February 2024