...But it's enough for the board house to balk at, even if they can't mfg to those tolerances. Oh well, released a slightly modified Gerber to deal with some "roundingness" in the mfg outputs and ensure things are a little cheaper overall (under...
I went ahead and added feedback from the fpga DONE pin via the addition of a status LED. Also added a jumper that enables that feedback to be sent back to the Arduino board. The jumper gives the option to route the DONE pin to the Arduino...
Got boards back from Advanced Circuits today. Look good. Really like the finish on them. They did a good job and boards came back on time (a little early actually) with a bag of microwave popcorn included. :) Mmmm...popcorn....
Boards have been built and worked the first time. Woohoo! Only thing I've noticed so far is that I neglected to tent the vias (cover them in soldermask) under the super small BGA SRAM. This has a nasty effect of making it very hard...
Ok, normally I don't complain about hand soldering stuff because normally it's pretty straight forward but this was a lesson I learned years ago come back to haunt me all over again. Rule #83: Tent the vias beneath your BGAs! Especially if...
Made some updates to the design over the weekend to add LEDs, a nice dipswitch, make the silkscreen cleaner, clean up the pad arrays a bit and a lot more in the way of little cosmetic PCB tweaks. Overall some very important tweaks but in the grand...
Uploaded a new batch of design files including PDFs to github. The repository can be found here and this rev contains some nice functional improvements. See previous project log for some details and see git log for summary of changes....
Added step models to all of the interesting parts of the board to make things look and feel more authentic and to size up enclosures and such that I will release that you can easily 3D print. Have a look at the pic below in the project overview....
Got enough parts to build 50 boards today. Updated stencils arrived, woo hoo! Retreating into soldering dungeon to spin up one or two to verify all's well with the world.
Got the new boards back from Advanced Circuits (they rock BTW...attention to detail like few others) and they look awesome. Went with black soldermask this time around and it makes things look so much cooler (much more Hackaday-chic). These...
Recently I'd gotten a fair bit of interest from folks wanting to buy or or trade for one of these FPGA boards...And I must admit, I'm not terribly capitalistic when it comes to stuff I build outside of the work context (I often find I just end up giving...
The first pass of this board was built with the Due in mind (3V3) and other development boards that I had sitting around, almost all of which *other* than Arduino were 3.3V. In planning the evolution of this however, it quickly made...
Whew! Last round of mods were huge because as you come to find out quickly, anytime you add a level translator to a board - much less two & much less 10 channels each - you end up having to reroute most of the PCB layout. And as though that wasn't enough,...
Just uploaded my first video on actually using the board. There are a few others to follow. The video is found on Youtube:This describes the various interfaces, the use of the resources, the jumper settings, power supply, etc.I have also uploaded the...