Now we couldn't very well let 500 hackers mess around with a bunch of open wires, so we needed to make a little enclosure for our control system. The simplest way to do this was to grab an off the shelf project enclosure from Radioshack.→InsertImageWe...
rev3 board, rerouted and moved components around to try to be closer to final design and clean up noise, split ground planes.Changed SPI's to use the hardware SPIs of the Cortex, they were all Software SPI before, adding all the names to the pins on...
Arko started putting the rev3 board together last night, we usually build the power section first and measure how it looks, make sure none of the power is shorted in the PCB ( it happens). This board has one always on regulator, its a 3.3V LDO that...
Terrible cell phone pic, the 1.3" 128x96 OLED SSD1306 is a direct drop in replacement for the 0.96". Though it is $5.00 vs $2.57 , I do like the bigger display . I'll hopefully take a better pic of it, certainly couldn't take a worse one....
Just took them out of the box, need to test them and see if they've worked, RF is black magic.The other boards are also out for manufacturing. They should be here this week , hopefully since we have to pre-build a bunch!
we're still waiting on a tracking number for the PCB's, the conference is in just over a week! and i can't finish the code til we get the first one made... oddly enough this hasn't been the closest we've cut it, but its getting there.since there...
It's wildfire season, but Fedex managed to get our boards from Malaysia to us in good time, unfortunately there was a cock up in the ordering department and they shipped to the billing address, we'd left there about 15 minutes before they showed up with...
After delays, e-test errors, shipping problems, wild fires and 6 revisions. These completely untested hopefully 4 layer PCBs have arrived. I'm probably just being paranoid but they sure look like 2 layer.Also Arrow decided that I didn't want overnight...
left side, LF antenna, middle HF antenna, right badge board, top combined HF/LF antenna.The late nights/early mornings have started. The HF antenna is marginal right now so we just need to get the right caps/inductors added, but it did read. The LF of...
Well layerone has been and gone, and apparently it was great, i don't know since i was in the back room getting a couple of hours sleep coding, while the others around me soldered boards together. I'm usually one to write up logs as they happen or just...
My first steps were to get my hands on a motor. I started with the X27.168 motor, seen here. There are a couple of variants of these motors. The 168 motors have the pins exiting on the back of the motor, while the drive shaft exits on the front....
With motors in hand, I built up a quick prototype. The X27 motors are designed to only move a small pointer. They draw so little current (under 20ma at 5v) that they can be driven by PIC and AVR micro pins directly. Soldering wires to the thin pins of...
I designed my PCB in my favorite software - Diptrace. The motor footprint from switec's datasheet was missing a few key dimensions. It took a bit of measuring with a caliper and calculating hole sizes, but I was able to get all the dimensions correct...
While the PCB's were being built, I turned my attention to the pointer issue. The switec motor's have a 1mm shaft. A good pointer has to be a press fit on the shaft, but not so tight that the mild steel motor shaft is bent while pressing the pointer...