Corgi Shaped SAMD21E Wearable Development Board

Inspiration

I've made a few corgi shaped boards in the past, with 328s, 1284Ps, and the RP2040, but all of them aren't suitable for beginners, as they require drivers, and need complex jumper wires/breadboards, and have rather high BOM costs. The Corgi "keychain" solves this with an ease of setup, compatibility, and wiring.

What it does

The Corgi "keychain" with a SAMD21E18 is a low BOM, easy-solder development board with a lot of RAM + flash(32 and 256K respectively), alligator friendly pads, and a STEMMA QT I2C connector. In addition, it supports both the Arduino IDE, and CircuitPython drag and drop programming.

How we built it

The Corgi Keychain was built with KiCAD EDA. I found a minimal SAMD21 schematic, added some extras(neopixel, USB-C), and downloaded the alligator clip footprints from SparkFun.

Challenges we ran into

I have only used neopixels(WS2812B) a few times, and initially I used the wrong footprint(WS2812, not WS21812B), which has a slightly different protocol and I was unable to proceed, until I realized the issue.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is the first board in the Corgi Arduino series that is suitable for beginners, not veterans.

What we learned

I learned about neopixel communication protocol, and also decoupling.

What's next for Corgi Shaped SAMD21E Wearable Development Board

In the future, I hope to make development boards with smaller sizes, greater power, and more special functionality(such as CAN).

Built With

• kicad