There is not always a good solution to design your PCB without testing some of the more important parts or implementations ideas that haven’t been tested before, to see if it is working as you thought. So from the beginning I have been using experimental PCB boards that I could use to test my solutions. But long ago I switch over to SMD parts and scraped the trough hole components that I had. And then the experimental boards became quite hard to use. So I started creating different small PCB boards that holds my standard parts and solutions.
I have quite a lot of them now, so I thought I could show a few.
I use plastic plate as base that has a grid of holes drill in it, so I can mount the boards and use Dupont cables to connect between each module.
MCU Boards
Since many year back now I use STM32 MCU family as my standard processor. I made my own break out boards for the different MCU family’s.
TFT 2.8 inch with touch + touch controller on the board
3 (half H bridge) channel power board, used as an example to drive BLDC motors
24bit ADC with a precision voltage reference
I have made a lot of small modules, here is a few. (Bluetooth, 2ch stepper motor driver, various)
For debugging I use my own USB to serial (3.3/5v) modules. And if the solution depends on various timings, then I place a dedicated connector with a few IO connections to the MCU. So when I debug internal race condition I can always use a logic analyzer to see what is happening.
I have also made some larger boards like my DDS module.
I put various function on the board that enables me to test a few DDS signal generator ideas I had.
I have many other test modules that I will add to the list later on.