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Weeknotes #4

If you're keeping count, you'll noticed we missed last week, and that's because we're still a student-run company (until next semester). However, with finals over, we've got a bunch of good updates to share! Here's what happened this week (and last):

  • Presented tinyCore via OpenHEG during CU Boulder's Senior Engineering Expo
  • Shared our project at CU's ATLAS Expo
  • Made some banger new business cards
  • Sold and tested more kits
  • Refined our Kit of Parts (now with a sweet treat)
  • Won a 9k Microgrant from Clear Creek Makerspace!
  • Begun editing our "How it's made - tinyCore" Video

Weeknotes #3

In the face of midterms and final projects, we continued to make progress on tinyCore! Here's what happened this week:

  • Began testing V2.1 PCBs
  • Attended First Pitch Colorado
  • Met with more professors for our Fall Cohort
  • Presented tinyCore at the Mines Entrepreneurship
  • Showcase
  • Shipped our first online orders
  • GOT ACCEPTED FOR OPEN SAUCE!!

Weeknotes #2

Hey everyone! Welcome to this week's Wednesday Weeknote. Here's what we've been up to:

🔥 Highlights

  • Sexy new documentation website
  • Presented at the 20th Anniversary Celebration for Clear Creek Makerspace
  • Applied to the Underdogs Grant fund by MatrixOwl
  • Hand-delivered a tinyCore V2 Starter Kit to a certain YouTuber 😎
  • Our latest shipment of PCBs as arrived! (Next up: Testinggg)

Weeknotes #1

We're changing up our Devnotes to from monthly to weekly updates! The goal of this is to promote "working with the garage door open," giving (you) our followers the inside scoop on our progress and decisions. Let's get into the weeknote:

This week was crazy! For starters, we released a 2 minute teaser for the tinyCore, and it blew up! (at least for us). It's currently standing at just over 2k views! You can check it out here if you missed it: https://youtu.be/wqKJGHjnWzM

  • in Devlog
  • 4 min read

Devlog #2: Boards Arrive & First Fulfillment!

A lot has happened in the last month! As an overview we've:

  • Ordered, received, and tested our Rev. 2 boards
  • Changed our name from iotaCore to tinyCore!
  • Started flyering/marketing around CU campus
  • Partnered with a wearable technologies course at CU to get hands-on beta-testing & feedback
  • Published our website and setup online payments
  • Fulfilled our first orders!!
  • in Devlog
  • 4 min read

Devlog #1: Rev 2 and Enclosure Testing

Hey guys! I'll be trying to post periodic/bi-weekly updates on development more frequently in these channels. Here's what happened in the last two weeks. We are rapidly developing the tinyCore as the first element of our project. Revision 2 has been created, with some minor circuit modifications and bug fixes. We've ordered 20 of this board, on 1/14, and we expect the boards to arrive prior to 2/22.

Custom Arduino Library

Our board needed a custom Arduino library, so I went through and made our own. First I started by copying the adafruit_feather_esp32s3_nopsram folder from:

C:\Users\macge\AppData\Local\Arduino15\packages\esp32\hardware\esp32\3.1.0-RC2\variants

I renamed this file to "iota_core_esp32s3_nopsram". (This is very important to remember, because this name definition must match exactly with the boards.txt file we will edit later.)

  • in Testing
  • 5 min read

SD Card Test

Finally got the SD Card working! Turns out the CS Pin is connected to GPIO1, not GPIO2, due to a pin mix-up in the library. Simple software fix, and it's like magic!

Also, I would recommend verifying that you don't have a corrupted Chinese-knockoff SD Card, as this will also cause you headaches and make things more difficult to solve.

For the SD test, we actually used the Arduino SD_Test Example, which worked out of the box (with our custom board library):

  • in Testing
  • 5 min read

ADC + MCP7428 Test