This is a board designed by Ian Lesnet (of Hackaday fame) that uses a USB-enabled PIC 18F2550 to control a set of RGB colored lights. This particular board was a from one of Ian’s Free PCB Sunday giveaways at his Dangerous Prototypes blog, where he gives away boards from one of his prototype runs each week. On this particular board you can see the silkscreen was a bit off in registration, but the drill and traces were just fine. A more complete description of the project can be found at DIY life.
This was a fun project to build; it’s made primarily of fairly common components, and was easy to build. I made one minor design change, omitting the on-board USB connector and directly soldering on a cable repurposed from an old USB device. The hardest part (for me) was programming the PIC. Even though I had a compatible ICD2 programmer, I had to find a way to adapt its 6-pin RJ11 connector to the .100 pinout. Something like this Sparkfun converter would be ideal, but I didn’t have one and wanted to get it working right away. I ended up using another PIC prototyping board that had the ICSP pins on an RJ11 socket as well as another set of .100 pins, after removing the PIC from the board it made for a workable (if somewhat wonky) converter.
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