Ordered the last design in yellow and it fits!
Just gotta procrastinate about adding components myself or getting a batch assembled…
The fancy pogo pin thingies seem to electrically do the job…..
This’ll be the last attempt at solderless, time’s ticking on and I really should plan to release this by Xmas!
I’m still trying to make this darn thing solderless….and, I have possibly a lead, which ain’t cheap…but will allow me to offer two versions.
Those gold things are pogo pins. But, slightly less common ones with a 1.2mm diameter pin part. This should sit quite nicely into the Next’s 1mm holes in J15…..except in my excitement, I forgot about that darn keyboard connector!
Using these requires yet another redesign, but a relatively minor one that only needs the connector stuff soldered on the reverse of the PCB…
On the plus side, this could make end user fitting of the inserts a little easier 🙂
As for ‘expensive’ – those pogo pins are around £1 each and at least 6 will be needed, more if the wifi relocation is used!
Beta 11 had a minor cock-up in that i’d missed off the 3v3 line. I’ve also taken the oportunity to shift things around a bit, re-align stuff and generally do a lot of really picky small stuff that generally makes me feel a bit better. Except that upside down C22 that i’ve just spotted, D’oh!
Also, I now introduce 2 more members of the Super LED Blinkenator 2000 family
This one, you’ve kind of met before. It’s a small ‘clamp’ PCB, but it now splits into two parts. One ‘spacer / shim’ sits in-between the Clampy larger bit, the other, is the clampy larger bit.
When installed, it’ll look a little something like this…..
Blue is the Next PCB. Red is the tiny thin break-off ‘spacer’. Black is the Blinkenator.
The Red ‘shim’ part stops the yellow clamping PCB from getting too close to the Blinkenator when the screws and nuts are tightened.
That combination of PCB’s, copper balls, nuts & bolts provides a robust electrical contact to J15 – Without needing to solder. Yes, it’s a little fiddly – I’ll make some instructions.
Another Member – The Programminator
Now i’ve switched over to a SMT atmega chip, it needs programming. I’ve bought some of the important signals out to a PCI EXpress connector to make for me, at Bleugh.Biz headquarters to quickly program the on-board arduino and test some basic features.
I thinkn REV 2 of this board could be useful for general tinkering also, so i’ll probably do a limited run to sell if people really want them. I’ll send out a handful of REV1 of this board to the BETA testers, IF BETA12 works.
And, finally – a quick overview of the new layout and routing. I’m now confident enough in the design to use a copper pour for a much more professional finish!
Have had quite a few ‘spare’ hours to tinker these past few weeks. Finally have gotten over a little bit of a hill and put some development time back into the SUPER LED BLINKENATOR 2000
Thanks to some fellow hardware developers for keeping me sane!.
The changes to this board – Mainly switching from a soldered on Arduino Pro Micro to using a discreet Atmega328p chip which is commonly found in the Arduino Pro Mini
My previous choice of Micro was mainly driven by attempting economies of scale and using the same one for the C64 Mini keyboard kit as this. Also, a desire to allow people to ‘program up’ their own Blinkenator board – The Atmega32u4 is a bit of an overkill for a handful of LED’s though. Importantly also, prices of arduinos have risen quite a bit since Brexit . Changing to a chip saves easily 60% in hardware costs over the soldered on Arduino, it also saves a handful of minutes in soldering!
It does introduce a little more complexity – I now need to figure out how to ICSP – In Circuit Serial Programmin works as i’ll need to burn an Arduino bootloader to each one.
I’ll also need to develop (or modify) a Programmer to allow a more day-day use of the device over UART to USB
Next step, port the Blinkenator to the 328p, test, if it works, Order Beta11
Oh, the Ball clamps are working superbly, just gotta be careful of feature creep on that clampinator board now!
oh, probably will look at swapping the JST connector footprints to SMT – would be nice if I can have just the
That’s 1000 WS2811, IP68 LED’s with about 9cm spacing in strings of 50.
Or, roughly enough to cover a 4 meter by 1.5 meter area.
I’ll need maybe 6 of them to cover the house frontage
50mA per LED…6000 LED’s…that’s gonna be 300 Amps at 5V. Sounds a lot but that’s maybe 3KW , fine from a domestic plug here in Blighty.
The plan. A house sized, low resolution TV
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