Dev board for the 16F88 + RS232 conversion

Archive New Product Ideas
1

Here’s an interesting project we’ve been kicking around. We’d like to get feedback:

The SerAccel pulls power off the RS232 DTR and RTS lines. Works great. We can get 10-20mA which is enough to run very small boards.

We’ve developed the bootloader that runs very well on the 16F88 at 20MHz.

Finally, over the weekend I decided to take the Shifter Board surface mount and see how small I could make it. Well, it’s tiny.

http://www.sparkfun.com/tutorial/PCB/Dev18.jpg

This mini 18-pin dev board needs no programmer, needs no external power, and has 12 general I/O as well as a full RS232 connection for communication.

We’re not sure what we could do with 20mA off the RS232 port power, but it makes for a small board with a lot of functionality.

Schematic : http://www.sparkfun.com/tutorial/PCB/De … ematic.pdf

Ideas? Applications?

-Nathan

2

That is a nice idea, but I think the current limit will rule out a lot of ideas.

I think a nice product might be a general pupose development board like the Olimex type aimed directly at the 16F88, internal 8MHz and boot loading. A reset button for MCLR would be good.

A regulator, etc would be helpful, but I also like to run the 16F88 directly off 3V, so a 2 pin header directly to VSS and VDD would be good. I know silkscreen space is limited, but it would be nice to lable 16F88 pins with all functions. “RA1/AN1” , etc. You could eliminate the oscillator related text.