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…
2017-05-31
The board circuit design and schematic are done. This is pretty terrible picture export. I couldn’t figure out how (spent 15 seconds) to export an SVG of the board without the copper fills. And here is the 3D rendering. A lot of 3D representations of components are missing, but the general gist is conveyed. All of the design work was done using KiCad (http://kicad-pcb.org/) EDA. Which of course means that I had to learn KiCad. Read more…