The most popular project of all time at Code and Life has been my DIY USB password generator. When I made it, I used a piece of veroboard that just fit inside a USB memory stick enclosure. Well, guess what: Benjamin Lunt just recently designed a custom PCB for it! I’ve been exchanging e-mails with him (Ben has written a book on USB, another very popular topic also in my blog) and he was kind enough to ship me one of these neat boards. Here’s what it looked like:
In addition to a nice USB connector footprint, this design also has a green power LED and a red transmission LED (which needs a small firmware change). Once assembled, the thing is really tiny, and it does work great. Thanks a lot for Mr. Lunt for designing this one! Be sure to visit his blog, as he’s interested if anyone would also like to have one (I know I did :). Maybe he’ll even publish the design files if someone wants to tinker with it (of course making your own isn’t too hard either).
On the right you can see what mine looked after some soldering (click for a larger image) – I love the fact that small resistors from Partco all had different base color for different values… I had to compromise a bit and use 48 ohm resistors instead of 58, and 4k7 instead of 2k2. For the LEDs, I used 480 ohms.