Review of TAUTIC Boards

TAUTIC Electronics LCC is owned and run by Jayson Tautic and specializes in Prototyping, design tools and gadgets for electronics design. Jayson is a popular figure in the social network and is often seen talking to other engineers on Google+ and Twitter. So having seen lots of people talk about his kit I was interested to see what they are like to use.

At first glance the store is a little light on products in the store but is growing and I know TAUTIC are working on new products that will be coming out soon. The boards I got hold of was the MAX31855 K-Type thermocouple board, the MAA7660FC 3-Axis Accelerometer, the MCP2200 USB to UART breakout board and lastly the Dual [3.3 & 5volt] Output Power Supply.

So first up is the K-Type board. This is supplied as a tiny little PCB in TAUTIC’s classic purple solder resist. The first thing I did was to add a pin header so I could plug this into a prototyping bread board. The design is released under the OSHW so you will find all the drawings on the product page. The device itself allows a SPI interface and has +/-2’C Accuracy and 14bit, 0.25 Resolution running on 3.3volts. I connected this up to as Arduino and used the sample code also on TAUTIC’s product page to test it out. This all works very well and could find nothing I even complain about!

Next is the Accelerometer break out board. This device looks like it also is released on the OSHW but could not see the logo on the board, but full drawings again along with data-sheet for the device and sample code was available. Again once connected to my Arduino it works very well. The device runs from 3.3volts and generates up to 120 samples per second at +/-1.5g in all three axis.

The Microchip MCP2200 is something I’ve looked at before. This breakout board allows for connection to your computer via USB to talk to your target using TTL serial communications (basically RS-232 at TTL levels). Using the above Accelerometer demo code I swapped over the arduinos UART to the second port and connect this break out board to it. Once again it all works with no real issues. You will note that there is EEPROM and 6 I/O pins on the MCP2200, these are only accessable from the USB side of the chip and not the UART side. This has nothing to do with TAUTIC, just the way Microchip designed the chip.

The last board to look at is the Dual Output power supply. I was very keen to look at this because while doing review I’m often in need of a 3.3 or 5 volt power rail. TAUTIC’s board uses two LDO LD1117xx series regulators to generate the supplies. The board has been designed as you can see to plug into your prototyping board. However I did find that it would not fit mine! I was gutted but after lots of looking into it I have found that there are two designs of prototyping bread board and that mine is just a little wider than the one the power supply was design for. So if you want one please check first with TAUTIC that it will fit. Having said that, I just turned mine round and that works fine plugging it into the normal prototyping area.

I then decided to test the board out under load. The details on the site say it will give 300mA at 7.5volts on the input. This I found worked as stated but wanted to use a 12volt wall plug supply. However when I did this I found I could really only pull about 200mA. This is because LDO regulators have to dump heat to get the voltage down. This higher the input voltage the more needs to be dumped. This means the devices get very hot - close to 100’C in fact - and then the internal limiters kicks in. So the important point to take from this is that the board and LDO get very hot even at a voltage input of 7.5 volts and that you need to watch your current usages. Its all to easy to add lots of LEDs and find yourself in trouble.

In all In was impressed with what TAUTIC has delivered. The boards are nice and small and great for use on a prototyping bread board. The cost of the boards is also very competitive in my view compared with others that are on sale and a lot cheaper then doing this yourself. TAUTIC has since added a 5x8 LED Matrix Kit and I know is working on a USB development board using a Microchip PIC18F47J53. So look out for this and other designs as they come along.

For interest I have added some of my reading from the Dual Power Supply Board when under load (amb = 23’C):

Vin = 7.5, load on 3.3 rail = 300mA, Reg-3.3 = 67’C, Reg-5 = 70’C
Vin = 10, load on 3.3 rail = 300mA, Reg-3.3 = 79’C, Reg-5 = 100’C
Vin = 12, load on 3.3 rail = 200mA, Reg3.3 = 65’C, Reg-5 = 85’C

Thanks

Paul ( @monpjc )