There are so many new cool MCUs coming out, and you want to play with all of them, but, initially, they tend to be accessible as bare chips. Devboards might be hard to get, not expose everything, or carry a premium price. [Willmore] has faced this problem with an assortment of new WCH-made MCUs, and brings us all a solution – a universal board for TSSOP20-packaged MCUs, breadboard-friendly and adaptable to any pinout with only a few jumpers on the underside.

The board brings you everything you might want from a typical MCU breakout – an onboard 3.3V regulator, USB series resistors, a 1.5K pullup, decoupling capacitors, and a USB-C port. All GPIOs are broken out, and there’s a separate header you can wire up for all your SWD/UART/USB/whatever needs – just use the “patch panel” on the bottom of the board and pick the test points you want to join. [Willmore] has used these boards for the CH32Vxxx family, and they could, no doubt, be used for more – solder your MCU on, go through the pin table in the datasheet, do a little point-to-point wiring, and you get a pretty functional development board.

Everything is open-source – order a few of these boards from your fab of choice, and you won’t ever worry about a breakout for a TSSOP20 MCU or anything that would fit the same footprint. It could even be used in a pinch for something like an I2C GPIO expander. This is also a technique worth keeping in mind – a step above the generic footprint breakouts. Looking for more universal breakouts to keep? Here’s one for generic LCD/OLED panel breakouts.

Hacking and making are great fun due to their open ended nature, but being able to try anything can make the task of selecting your next project daunting. [Steph Piper] is here with her Maker Skill Trees to give you a map to leveling up your skills.

Featuring a grid of 73 hexagonal tiles per discipline, there’s plenty of inspiration for what to tackle next in your journey. The trees start with the basics at the bottom and progressively move up in difficulty as you move up the page. With over 50 trees to select from (so far), you can probably find something to help you become better at anything from 3D printing and modeling to entrepreneurship or woodworking.

Despite being spoiled for choice, if you’re disappointed there’s no tree for your particular interest (underwater basket weaving?), you can roll your own with the provided template and submit it for inclusion in the repository.

Want to get a jump on an AI Skill Tree? Try out these AI courses. Maybe you could use these to market yourself to potential employers or feel confident enough to strike out on your own?

[Thanks to Courtney for the tip!]

Our PCBs greatly benefit from cases – what’s with all the pins that can be accidentally shorted, connectors that stick out of the outline, and cables pulling the board into different directions. Designing a case for your PCB might feel like a fair bit of effort – but it likely isn’t, thanks to projects like turbocase from [Martijn Braam].

This script generates simple and elegant OpenSCAD cases for your KiCad PCBs – you only need to draw a few extra lines in the PCB Editor, that’s it. It makes connector openings, too – add a “Height” property to your connector footprints to have them be handled automatically. Oh, and there’s a few quality-of-life features – if your project has mounting holes, the script will add threaded-insert-friendly standoffs to the case; yet another argument for adding mounting holes to your boards, in case you needed more.

Installing the script is a single line, running it is merely another, and that will cover an overwhelming majority of boards out there; the code is all open too, of course. Want some more customization? Here’s some general project enclosure tutorials for OpenSCAD, and a KiCad-friendly StepUp tutorial. Oh, and of course, there’s many more ways to enclose PCBs – our own [Bob Baddeley] has written a guide to project enclosures that you are bound to learn new things from.

We thank [adistuder] for sharing this with us!

Technical work — including problem-solving — is creative work. In addition, creativity is more than a vague and nebulous attribute that either is or isn’t present when it’s needed. A short article by [Anthony D. Fredericks] gives some practical and useful tips on energizing and exercising one’s creativity.

Why would creative thinking be meaningful to a technical person? The author shares an anonymous observation that as children we’re taught to stay inside the lines, while as adults we are often expected to think outside the box. Certainly when it comes to technical tasks, our focus is more on logical thinking. But problem solving benefits as much from creative thinking as it does from more logical approaches.

How can one cultivate creative thinking? The main idea is that creativity is best flexed and exercised by actively looking for connections and similarities between highly dissimilar elements, rather than focusing on their differences. Some thought exercises are provided to help with this process. Like with any exercise, the more one does it, the better one becomes.

Practicing more creative thinking can help jolt new ideas and approaches to a tough problem, so give it a shot. It’s also worth keeping in mind that we all need a feeling of progress, especially during extended times of applying effort to something, so do yourself a favor and give yourself an occasional win.

[samsuksiri] frequently uses a laptop and has an external drive to store projects. The drive flops around on the end of its tether and gets in the way, so they repurposed their old iPod pouch and attached it to the laptop lid with double-sided tape. You can guess how that went — the weight of the drive caused the pocket to sag and eventually detach over time.

Then [samsuksiri] remembered that they had LEGO DOTS patch stashed somewhere. It’s an 8×8 plate with adhesive on the back so you can build almost anywhere. Then the problem was this: how to attach LEGO to the drive itself? You’d think this is where the hot glue comes in, but that didn’t work because the drive is too slippery.

Nothing worked, really — not until [samsuksiri] flipped the drive over to work with the dimpled side that has un-coated plastic. Finally, the answer turned out to be mounting tape. Now, [samsuksiri] can attach the drive in any orientation, or even attach a second drive. Be sure to check it out after the break.

Looking for slightly more astounding LEGO creations? Check out this hydroelectric dam.

Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip!