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Sprang Our First Leak
04/18/2018 at 06:53 • 0 commentsRan into problems on day 1!
First - I messed up a chip pattern when designing the PCB and the through holes on BUS_SWITCH2 are too close together... It turns out I used DIP-56/600mil/x1.778 - I had no idea what x1.778 meant.. apparently it means the holes are closer together.. I'll have to research that more.
Second - the patterns used for BUS_SWITCH2 and BUS_SWITCH1 were reversed! BUS_SWITCH1 should be a DIP-56 and BUS_SWITCH2 should be the DIP-48.. I'm not sure how that happened, but I'm still learning all the tools with DipTrace, so ... you know.
Third - A couple of the lines failed to route and I didn't catch it - in DipTrace you can go to Verification->Check Net Connectivity to validate everything is routed correctly. Lesson learned!
Fourth - I figured I might be doing a few of these with my trial and error - so I started adding versioning to the board.
Here is the previous one - with the red circle around the most egregious error I made:
And here is the new one.. I just ordered it from jlcpcb.com and I'll update when it arrives! -
Testing the Waters (PCB has arrived)
04/17/2018 at 18:24 • 0 commentsExciting update, the PCB has arrived - this week I will be attempting to hook everything up and see if it works. I'm not expecting my first iteration to work.. but there is always hope - at least if it doesn't hopefully I can quickly figure out why.
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Setting Sail
04/17/2018 at 05:03 • 0 commentsThis is my first entry - I started working on this ~ Nov 2017.
I have a bread boarded motherboard (see the youtube link) which seems to work, and I just sent off for the PCB.
For now my test code does this:
- The Professor reads raw controller input and packs it up for Gilligan.
- Gilligan consumes it and creates a string based packet he sends to the Professor.
- The Professor then writes it to serial out.
The Professor will normally do controller reading and packet updating every VSYNC from The Ocean.. but right now it gets the interrupt from it's own 30hz watchdog timer.
The schematics and raw details can be found in the github repo.
Here's a rendering of the pcb I'm expecting...