Chu Tien Thinh's Felini Aims to Be a Pocket-Friendly Replacement for a Range of Debugging Tools
Offering everything from a 3.3-20V DC power supply to a CAN bus and logic analyzer, Felini is a real box of wonders.
Hardware developer and programmer Chu Tien Thinh has created a pocket-friendly "electronic lab," designed to offer a range of debugging and hardware control functions in a compact and low-cost package: Felini.
"As an electronics engineer and enthusiast, our workspace is truly a fully equipped laboratory, complete with an oscilloscope, power supply, multimeter, logic analyzer, and a wide array of programming boards for different microcontroller families," Thinh explains. "We also have various USB converters like CAN, SPI, I2C, UART, RS485, all of which are essential for our work. However, acquiring all these tools can be expensive, especially for students, yet they are indispensable for circuit debugging."
Sick of carrying a backpack with everything needed for general-purpose debugging and experimentation, Thinh developed Felini: a compact gadget which fits in the palm of your hand, never mind a backpack, and yet which can replace a range of hobbyist-grade tools — making for an easier toolkit to carry around than discrete tools.
Built in a 3D-printed case and with exposed male header pins opposite a USB connector, the Felini includes a USB UART supporting bitrates up to 921,600 bits per second (bps), a USB DAPLink programmer and debugger for Arm-based microcontrollers, and an adjustable DC power supply offering 3.3-20V at up to 2A. There's a signal generator for frequencies up to 40MHz, and a logic analyzer for signals up to 20MHz. For analog work, there's even a voltmeter — good for signals at 5V or below, Thinh notes.
Other features of the board include a USB CAN bus adapter compatible with the Linux-based socket CAN stack, USB to UART, SPI, I2C, and RS485 buses, a "quick check" system for I2C devices, pulse-width modulation (PWM) for servo control, and the ability to measure and count pulses and signal frequencies.
More information on Felini is available on the project's Hackaday.io page, while the PCB design files and 3D case model have been published to GitHub under an unspecified open source license.
