2017-06-24
The turkey has landed The boards have arrived and the lost Digi-key order has been retrieved. The folks where the package was erroneously delivered were kind enough to reach out to me and I picked it up from them. Assembly wasn’t terrible. Almost everything fit perfectly. I must have double-dosed my stupid pills the day I laid out the pads for the fuse holders. Apparently they’re 9mm wide and I, for some reason, allocated 6mm Read more…
2017-06-18
Well the boards have been lost in shipment along with a Digi-Key order. Two orders in the span of two days. Not even properly lost. They were delivered to the wrong address. Through complete and total incompetence of the USPS I received junk mail destined for 1234 Street A. I live on 1234 Street B. According to Google maps that’s a neighborhood two streets over so it’s probably the same mail route. Put two and Read more…
2017-06-12
With all this extra time on my hands while waiting for the PCB to come back, instead of working on the house, playing with the dog, interacting with family, or doing a push-up I decided to test some of the circuitry I’ve already sent off for fabrication. The portion of the circuit under test this time was the the over-voltage crowbar circuit. The basic idea is that if the voltage goes above spec, 5.5V for Read more…
2017-06-08
The design of the power and serial cape is done. The components have been ordered. I will wait until the IO board comes back and the components come in before sending the cape off to fab. Juuuuust to make sure I didn’t screw up some minute detail that renders the design useless. Additionally, I found a high-resolution picture of the IO board PCB in ‘as made’ representation on the OSH Park’s website. Neato. Front: Back: Read more…
2017-06-06
While waiting for the I/O board PCB to come back from fabrication I started designing the BBB cape that will house the serial drivers, power supply to the I/O board, more LEDs, and etc. This of course is necessary because the BBB’s serial ports operate at TTL level and are not tolerant of “proper” RS232 voltages and its I/O pins must not have voltage applied until the chip boots (the reset line goes high). First Read more…
2017-06-03
The board has been ordered, panelized, and sent off to production. So far the process has been moving along at a much faster clip than I anticipated. The board was panelized the same day I placed the order even though I ordered fairly late in the afternoon; certainly after business hours. The next day I received an email that the board has been sent off to fabrication. I know the email says that they expect Read more…