• Package, PCB and Pointless Pictures

    edscalatie • 05/29/2018 at 06:45 • 0 comments

    The waiting is over, the second batch has arrived and it looks good. This time I actually added the planes and if all is well, within a few days the first LED should be blinking. If all is well ofcourse...... Still I have high hopes that at least the programmer and the burning of the bootloader will be a lot easier then a year ago when if had to rewire every mistake i made by hand. Because this is actually the 3rd batch of PCB's some issues have already been resolved. For the people who wonder why there is a hole in the PCB, this hole should contain the "Piezo tap sensor" in the finished product. Because these sensors are fairly thick, it was sunk into the board to to reduce the overall thickness of the board plus components.

    I'm sorry for the image quality. These pictures were taken in the middle of the night without proper light.

  • Let's do this

    edscalatie • 05/24/2018 at 09:57 • 0 comments

    Alright, this is the first time i'm actually posting anything online about a hobby project. I figured the best place to start documenting my brainwaves and monstrosities would be on hackaday so lets go. One year ago I started my first watch project which stalled after tying to solder everything together. The QFN packages and bad board design made the board hard to assemble by hand. Multiple design failures and wrongly ordered components lead to the ending of that project. I still have some scrap boards lying around somewhere. maybe I will upload an image of my first PCB fail. To be honest the current project I have been working on is already running for a while. That's why the introduction with my goalds will follow in a later post. Let's get you up to speed where the project stands right now.

    The design has been finished and the first batch of PCB's have been ordered and received. To bad that I forgot to draw my ground and powerplanes when generating the gerber files. It took an hour before understanding that nothing that was connected when debugging the boards. Sometimes it is worth looking at your files using a gerber viewer and finding out these fails before ordering a PCB. Oh well a new batch has been ordered and the components have been received. The boards will be at my doorstep within a week or two so we've got some time to kill.

    The next post will contain a background story about the idea, the goals and an explenation about the design choices. greetz!