LabVIEW in a Box! 2 - I made a PCB

[swatts]

Hello Cheap Hardware Enthusiasts I'm back from my writing hiatus!,

Adjacent to our CTI work I have been busy trying to get my LabVIEW in a Box concept together.

To summarise :- I wanted a small, cheap computer that I could pre-load with an image and use with our CTI Pico firmware. I identified the Radxa X4 and the more I use it the more I love this little PC.

I've loaded Lubuntu Linux on it and LabVIEW 24 Q3 for Linux with all the drivers and it all works rather well.

The good news with the X4 is that it has a Raspberry Pi Pico on-board - the bad news is that the header is sort of Raspberry Pi, bit not quite and definitely not a Pico. The other issue is that using breadboards to wire things to the Pico seemed a bit risky as it was on-board, and you could quite easily fritz the whole board.. So I found a rabbit-hole called Grove and I completely fell down it. 

Grove System

I now needed a Pico-centric Grove connector for the Radxa and such a thing doesn't exist, so I made one in Kicad.

And I'm very pleased with it! I've attached the Kicad project to this article. Use at your own risk.

We used Safe-PCB and, after a bit of a mix-up with payment was sorted out, a couple of boards were delivered. Everything worked well during testing (full disclosure - I still have the SPI stuff to test).

Here's a video of it all working ...

So let's get some costs for a computer that can run, edit, build and deploy LabVIEW systems, with hardware on-board that can do lot's of things (as I will explain in the next article)

Part	Cost
Radxa X4	£61
Toshiba(Kioxia) 256GB PCIe NVMe 2230 SSD (KBG40ZNS256G) (OEM), 30mm, Solid State Drive	£25
Heatsink	£20
HDMI Lead	£15
PCB (2-off custom made PCB... so very expensive)	£13
Grove OLED Display	£6
Total	£140

Put that into Currency Convertor to see what that is outside the UK... Who knows what tariffs to apply to that.

I think that is pretty spectacular!

Lots of Love