[The Monkey]

jeez louise. nice.

 

[linuxworks]

detail on how to mount the watch crystal (on the reverse side of the board):

a small loop of wire-wrap wire (or equiv) holds the crystal in place and also to ground. solder both ends of the loop on the opposite side (component side) of the board.

note: you have to do this BEFORE you install the 8pin socket for the clock, chip, itself.

there aren't too many things that have to be done in order; but this is one of them

once this is in place, THEN you can solder the supercap on top of this (if you want a 'battery backup' of the clock).

 

[amb]

Quote:

Originally Posted by linuxworks /img/forum/go_quote.gif detail on how to mount the watch crystal (on the reverse side of the board): ... a small loop of wire-wrap wire (or equiv) holds the crystal in place and also to ground. solder both ends of the loop on the opposite side (component side) of the board.

I used a thin resistor lead clipping (from the 1/8W miniature resistors), mounted it as shown in linuxworks' photo, but simply soldered it onto the "pads" instead of forming a loop on the other side.

Btw, my LCDuino-1 is also up and running.

 

[John E Woven]

just wondering, what's the point of having all those holes on the side of the board?

 

[mattcalf]

Quote:

Originally Posted by John E Woven /img/forum/go_quote.gif just wondering, what's the point of having all those holes on the side of the board?

From AMBs webpage:[size=small]
[/size]
Quote:

Prototype through-plated pads area on 0.1" grid for custom applications

 

[linuxworks]

the proto holes are for when you need to add 1 or 2 chips or some other small circuit that is part of the application you are building.

for example, in the motorized pot case, you need an h-bridge. one can fit nicely on the proto holes.

maybe you want some relays. some small ones can go there.

molex connectors for offboard wiring. you can run some thin wires from the breakout pads (_D* and _A* holes) to the proto area and then have the molex offboard connectors solder in there.

I mounted a 7805 voltage reg chip on the proto holes for one app. I'll probably add a piezeo buzzer (tell me when to stop pulling the espresso shot, lol).

maybe you need more ram, so you can install an i2c eeprom chip and save lots of data in there (webservers need lots of string data, for example).

I'm sure people can think of other small additions that could fit on the proto holes area.

 

[nattonrice]

Holy wow I totally missed this!
Guys this is seriously awesome work o(^-^)o

I love the AMB Labs / LinuxWorks Labs on the silkscreen! Pure class =]

 

[linuxworks]

some detail on soldering and shrink-tubing seal on the vishay IR receiver module.

I've decided to have the TSOP (ir device) end soldered to the wire; and the other end of this cable will terminate in a keyed 3pin molex plug.

these TSOP modules do NOT like to be hooked up wrong. I blew up at least 2 or 3 of them over the past few months (semi lol). so I think its a good idea to make them connector-keyed.

you can also mount the IR module on a very small piece of perf board and then have a molex keyed plug/socket on that.

many ways to skin this cat; and this is just one of them

for doc purposes: pin ordering on those vishay TSOP modules are, left to right: signal-out, ground, +5v. I like green or black for ground and something like red or orange or yellow (depending on where you cut your 3 wire ribbon from, lol) as +5v.

again, its really easy to blow these parts if you hook them up wrong. so the extra effort to pick colors and be sure about what goes where, that pays off, here

 

[aloksatoor]

impressive

let the coding begin

already ordered an educational kit from hacktronics

 

[linuxworks]

someone asked (today, in fact) for a temperature display.

done.

using an lm34 linear temp sensor (outputs direct voltage for F or C degrees; lm34=F and lm35=C) on the small perf board going to analog-in-0 on the arduino.

every clock second it 'smooth value' reads the analog-in port, scales the value and displays the current temperature next to the time

the temp sensor could be clamped to a transistor heatsink (to monitor your bias) or just placed inside the chassis to show 'internal chassis temp'. you could even have a 3 pin jack on the back of the box and run this cable externally to get 'ambient room temperature'.

 

[mattcalf]

Awesome stuff Linuxworks + AMB.

All this information that the LCDuino is capable of gathering, do you plan for it to be displayed on one 'home' screen or will there be a capability of creating a button on the front panel to take us to the (for example) temperature screen?

Cheers,
Matt.

 

[linuxworks]

any kind of control you want. there are spare 'logical pins' (pins with a name and function and relate 1:1 to actual physical chip pins) on the arduino. you can use one of those for a front panel button or buttons. if you start to run out of 'pins' on the cpu, you then move on to using a 'port expander' like the one that is vertically oriented on the pc board, that MCP chip. that takes in 'i2c serial' and puts out 8 bits of controllable i/o lines. you can then use a mix/match of input and output on those pins and then call routines to get and set values to them. if that makes sense..

the software is meant to be editable and there will be many examples that show what routines do what. its then a case of you, the user, doing some light (or heavy) mods to the software, downloading into the device, trying it and going back again until satisfied

that's what I had in mind; not so much any 'final' software but a framework, a set of examples, some canned demo apps (might be called end-user apps) and from there you can take any/all of that and run with it

some things you may change, while the system is installed and running, via menu pages. but major changes in how the thing works would mean you go into the source editor (text editor), move/edit some blocks of text around, add your own stuff if you want, then build/download/test. and if it works, publish it back so others can use it

in terms of the temperature thing, I happened to have a spare lm34 hanging around (..) and also had a spare analog-in port, so it was easy to just use that.

but if I wanted to monitor, say, EACH of the heatsinks (yeah), then you'd need a more software addressable way of getting to each one of them. for that, there is OneWire (heh) and also i2c. i2c chips seems cheap (50cents each). I may try them and see if they work. if they 'play well' in the i2c bus along with our lcd port expander chip, then we get to use *lots* of temperature sensors. haven't tried yet, but its on the to-do list

 

[linuxworks]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mattcalf /img/forum/go_quote.gif All this information that the LCDuino is capable of gathering, do you plan for it to be displayed on one 'home' screen

that reminds me, one possible thing to do with 'gathered information' is to send it to a pc, somewhere. suppose you wanted to get a graph of simultaneous (ie, time matched) sensor readings of rail voltage, bias voltage, heatsink temperature, powerOn-time and maybe even volume level. those are a bunch of collected 'data points'. the ard can't keep all that locally (for long) and so if you are into data collection or need to watch things for debugging, you want that up on some host or pc.

a wireless link is kind of neat

there are these xbee modules that have arduino drivers. you can create a pt-pt tunnel between arduinos and other arduinos or even pc's. if one endpoint is the pc, then it can store the logged data. import into a spreadsheet and go nuts

 

[Wilf]

Very, very interesting.

I know the sabre32 chip is under an NDA, but would that prevent grabbing the bit depth/sample rate information from the buffalo 32, and displaying it on this unit? Not interested in volco myself, but displaying this information would be interesting for me.

 

[Lifthanger]

what did you do? my wallett is in tears...

I'm happy about this project though

. Thanks alot!