Anwaar, which is Arabic for "a collection of lights," combines art and circuitry into a convenient, attractive, wearable medium of expression. Each of our products includes a microcontroller, power-management circuitry, breakouts, a hybrid supercapacitor, and a beautifully designed faceplate, which is where the magic happens. You can wear your Anwaar as a necklace or brooch, hang it as an ornament, carry it as a pocket token, build it into a product, or put it to use in a million other ways.

The Extended Anwaar Family

The Anwaar collection will include several different families of boards that differ in size, shape, and microcontroller location. All families share certain design principles, however. They are all two-piece products that include a baseboard connected to a faceplate by a low-profile header and M.2 machine screws. faceplates are swappable and used to display circuit art while baseboards handle energy storage and power management.

This campaign will focus on the Amulet family. Our Amulets are small disks, 36 mm in diameter and 7.2 mm thick. They are extremely satisfying to hold in your hand and small enough that you can hang them from or attach them to just about anything.

We built Anwaar so that folks who are just getting started with PCB design can produce their own Anwaar-compatible faceplates. Depending on what components you choose to incorporate into your creation, you may need intermediate soldering skills, but we selected SMD headers with a 1.27 mm pitch because they’re reasonably easy to solder by hand. And all of the components we use to construct Anwaar are available "off the shelf" from semiconductor and component distributors.

Features & Specifications

All of the Amulets in this campaign include our A-TINY-15F baseboard and a compatible faceplate. One of the faceplates we’re making available is our A-Proto board, which you can use to prototype your own design.

A-TINY-15F Baseboard

• ATtiny1616 MCU
• 2.8 V 15F hybrid capacitor
• Two-channel USB UART UDPI programming & serial debugging interface
• TPS63900 buck-boost with dynamic voltage scaling
• Programmable VDD from 1.8 V to 3.6 V
• Low-profile header with six PWM pins available (I²C and Analog also available on select pins)
• Power switch for output control
• ROHM charge controller for CC/CV charging
• Includes spacers and five M.2 screws
• Dimensions:
  • 36 mm in diameter
  • 1.6 mm thick
  • 4 mm between baseboard and faceplates.
  • Combined thickness is about 7.2 mm

A-Proto Faceplate

• Can be used to break out from the baseboard to test ideas for your own faceplate
• Can also be used to freehand solder your own faceplate
• Pads are broken out for all pins
• Includes resistors for setting VDD to 1.8 or 3.0 V

Anwaar in Action

PWM Fade Example

PTC Touch Example

Face-Plate Swap Example

Hybrid Capacitors

Pinout Diagram

Support & Documentation

Anwaar is OSHWA-certified open hardware, and our baseboards are licensed under CERN-OHL-S V2.0. We relied on free and open-source tools like KiCad, FreeCad, and Krita to build it, and our design files are available on Gitlab. We also provide KiCad templates to help you with your own faceplate designs. Just add them to your third-party templates folder, and create a new project to get started. Thanks to a wonderful third-party Arduino core, Anwaar boards are easy to program. (Here’s some sample code!) Last but not least, we’re working to improve our documentation and tutorials.

In case it’s not obvious, we’re really excited to see what you all make with Anwaar!

Manufacturing Plan

Our plan is to contract manufacture partial assemblies to reduce attrition. We will then complete final assembly, testing, and kitting at home. Due to the ever changing nature of the times, we are also exploring the possibility of doing more assembly at home for the simple boards, depending on total order quantity.

Fulfillment & Logistics

After our production run is complete, we will package everything up and send it along to Crowd Supply’s fulfillment partner, Mouser Electronics, who will handle distribution to backers worldwide. You can learn more about Crowd Supply’s fulfillment service under Ordering, Paying, and Shipping in their guide.

Risks & Challenges

Since we finalized the hardware design, a couple of key components have gone end of life. One is the charging IC, which has plenty of stock at resellers, so we’re not too worried about it. The other is the HVC hybrid capacitor that allows us to keep the back flush and the enclosure slim. This should be a non-issue at the quantities we’re planning for, but it’s still a risk. If necessary, we have a backup design that relies on a different hybrid cap. It would require a small cutout for the cap’s cylindrical packaging and would slightly increase the board’s overall height. Other risks include the volatile nature of component pricing and international shipping, which we’ll just have to navigate as we go.