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I designed this circuit board and just sent it out to be manufactured today. Hopefully it will work! There are so many possible errors available...
What happened before, "who's bright idea was that!"
(An excited iPhone snap taken and sent to my brother which was posted on the 18th November)
On the 8th November, a man known only as Adrian suggested I add an LED to show off the interior. Actually a good idea, fortunately for me my brother dabbles in home electronics.
He sent me a few links for circuit building apps and the places to shop for components.
Top pictures, one is recycled from the start of the build, but it came in useful here, it shows where I originally planned to set the battery packs, this gave me some idea of what size batteries I would need to buy. The other two shots were taken on the 9th, these basically gave me an idea of where I would run the cables, from here I decided the idea was at least viable. I also had it on good authority that a light circuit was about as basic as it gets........
At this point I knew nothing about electronics, I can wire in a plug......& 15-16 years ago I did some silver soldering and brazing but that was using an oxy acetylene torch, hot and cold flame work and definitely not fine soldering! Experience nonetheless.
Bottom pic (d7100 18th November)
First electronics component package!
Excited as a kid in a sweet shop, christmas come early!
.....and just like christmas, no battery included in the test meter!
Everything was cheap! Cheapest soldering iron, cheapest multimeter (no battery), a few resistors, LEDs, batteries (and type charger) and assorted what nots, things I thought I would need! All in, about £20 plus tools batteries and charger.
(Next few uploads fill in the blanks from here to who's bright idea......)
It really has been a great adventure!
A research sample laminated with DuPontTM PV5300 Series encapsulant. Researchers are developing new materials for electronic applications, including photovoltaic module production.
This Fry's is located in an odd-shaped building, like converted 70s office space. The interior theme is a tropical island paradise. No cafe.
Manhattan Beach, CA
We came across an interesting oddity from the realm of consumer electronics: a fake seven-segment LED display. Just for fun, we made our own version too.
Read more about this project here.
Front view still missing a few components. What could it be?
PCB through the excellent DorkbotPDX batch PCB service (nice colour)!
Here's the result of carelessness when ordering microcontrollers (aka μCs, "μ" for "micro" and "C" for "controller). They, like other chips, are available in different sizes. Same silicon inside, but varying carriers. As you'd expect both the silicon and the packages have gotten smaller over the years, but the old larger packages are still available for many chips for compatibility with existing circuitry, and, well, I'm not sure why else.
So the other day I decided the prototyping of my Nixie tube watch was getting toward where I could start thinking about making some circuit boards, so I chose a suitably small form of the watch's microcontroller and ordered a few - I thought.
The chip at the top is in the classic Dual Inline Package (DIP). There's one like it wired up in my nixie watch prototype. Though fine for prototyping, this form of the chip is much too big to be used in an actual watch - even a big fat nixie watch.
The chip in the lower right is the size I meant to order - the Small Outline Integrated Circuit (SOIC). They're reasonably small, and I've soldered them into circuits successfully before.
I goofed up, though, and the little guy below Lincoln's nose is what I ended up with: the Micro Lead Frame Package (MLF). This one is lying on its back. It's a great size for use in a watch, but much teenier than anything I've attempted to solder before. That is, I've soldered stuff that is overall no bigger than that, but this chip needs 20 separate solder joints, 5 on each edge where the little light bits are. Those are half a millimeter apart - yikes!
But you know what? I think I'll give it a try, just to see if I can pull it off. With a bit of care and solder flux, a lot of magnification, and a super-duper fine point iron tip, I bet I can get it to work.
Original site of the Laboratory and factory of Federal Telegraph Company, founded in 1909 by Cyril F Elwell. Here, with two assistants, Dr. Lee De Forest, inventor of the three-element radio vacuum tube, devised in 1911 - is the first vacuum tube amplifier and oscillator. World-wide developments based on this research led to modern radio communication, television, and the electronics age.
California Registered Historical Landmark No. 836
Plaque placed by the state department of parks and recreation in cooperation with the city of Palo Alto and the Palo Alto Historical Association, May 2, 1970
At the top there is the spindle drive (20hp) and 3 servo drives.
On the right (with all of the blue wires) is the new PC interface, we're using a Mesa 7i77 board.
CNC electronics enclosure with a switched-mode power supply, a solid state relay for spindle control, three A3977 based stepper motor drivers for x, y, and z, a controller power supply, and the controller board. The controller is based on Microchip PIC18F8680, and the milling program is read off a USB stick using a VNC1L (the board is not shown). The whole system is controlled using a graphical touch screen LCD.
Using an ATtiny 85 to control power supply. Push button toggles power on/off with ATtiny in charge of reading button after power on and actually powering down circuit.
The PCBs for my nixie tube clock arrived, and I even got twice as many as I ordered! Hurrah for Gold Phoenix.
At any rate after a marathon soldering session they are finally assembled and awaiting testing and programming and all that. The power supply works, and the AVR was programmable, so that's a good sign!
Electronics factory workers, Cikarang, Indonesia © ILO/Asrian Mirza
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