The Battle of the Bulge

The pucks are no longer square ! Ok they were always round but the sides were straight. With the addition of a slight bulge 1mm, the design looks much better. And that was hard. In the past I have used Rhino as my cad program and it has served me well. But to do the electronic design I moved to Fusion 360. And when it came time to redo the physical design I moved to Fusion 360 as well. Huge learning curve. Just know enough to get what I want done. Love the history feature, once I understood it. Best part being after the design was done and I wanted to add the bulge, I could go back and do so. And it worked.

Software stack

So most of the work now is on the software, yes we got tired of having pucks scattered all over out benches so we do get to do some mechanical design too. The processor is an esp32-S3 and now we are taking to original test code and turning it into a system , more on this soon. But in the mealtime the blinkey lights are nice.

Nature let the smoke out

Unfortunately the smoke was from the LA fires. And so everything changes. Clothing computers and art to the car. Note the lack of tool and project supplies. Hopefully we can return home in a few days. We are the lucky ones.

Read the data sheet

My bad, I threw the 5V Boost/Buck converter on the board with minimal concern for the layout. Eventually all the 5V converters would die, probably due to a bad layout. Got new tools to remove these parts, not to replace them but to bypass them for now (see big black wire)So the 5V stuff that I wanted to run at a higher voltage to get more punch and to be able to disable for power savings, is now running off 3.3 V. But no more smoked components. And the I2C bus is happy because all the ships are always powered up. BTW even with the new microscope and lots of capton tape, removing the converters is very hard. Took out extra components the first time, but they were in support of the converter so no loss. Boards are now stable, LED’s ar eworking, but no sound, haptic or imu (accelerometer), yet.

First Smoke

Ok click bait, no real smoke but real parts failing. First, got a scope, thanks to Kenny, and began probing things. I made some errors. I can control the 5V power and turn it one and off so power savings modes here we come. But.. I left the I2C but attached to the unpowered 5V part of the board. So it wont work when 5V is disabled. I always enabled the 5v and I see better signals on the I2C. But, (hey bold cool) while sittign on my bench running the boards just stopped. The usb 5v is off, off off. So something is shorting it out. Smoke would be nice then I would know where to look.

First Light

Powered it up and with the arduino ide I can access it !!!!

Managed to get the led ring to run, no luck with the haptics, imu or speaker but the I get blinky lights.

Lots to do (see last sentence). Trying to trouble shoot the afore mentioned with a meter. Not luck and the parts are so small. :-( Oh and Im’catching up, lots has happened in the project and in my other life so here we go.

Christmas is red and green.

Package arrived, all 10 boards. Now to inspect and buzz out the voltages. And Yes now we play catch up. The boards look very nice. Clean and good placement of the parts. I don’t see any shorts between the voltages. There is an inductor missing that supplies the 3 volts to the 5 volt buck/boost regulator. I ask for the wrong part and figured it was big enough that I can solder it on. So at the start I can run the ESP32 and the IMU and that’s about it, but that will be a start. Next stop plugin the usb cable and see if I get smoke….

188 is not 260 !

My bad days begin with “Re : Re: Re : Re: Re : Re: Re : Re: Re : Re: Re :”

Which means that Pcbway has another problem/question. In this case the second time they received the LED’s (the first time they were just the wrong ones) They got 188 of the LED’s not the 260 that are needed and were ordered. So in order to assemble the entire batch through at once, we wait. Another 7 to 10 days.

A Fusion 360 victory !

Fusion 360…. err ahhh Yea. Fusion 360 is so different from the other CAD programs I have used. An yet it looks the same so you try the old ways and no. I don’t just mean the muse buttons behave differently (they do), of the shortcut keys are different (they are). The way you approach making a model is different. So I keep getting frustrated because things are not going as fast as I think they should. And I have to keep reminding myself, it’s ok.

I continued with Fusion 360 because that is where I did my PCB design and I knew it was “better”. But I have sweated, sworn and learned. The picture above is the first prototype of the enclosure for our project. … And I just realized I forgot the hole for the usb port. Sigh.

300 pieces dont fit !

Got an email from my fab house. 300 of my pieces dont fit their pad layout. That’s 25 leds per board. Times 10 boards. Looks like that because they got the wrong part ordered or delivered. I had the right part number. Now we wait for their concurrence and to get the new parts in. The 50 parts were my fault I got the wrong part number. But all but one can be fixed and the one can be worked around.

Gotta love building boars with so many tiny parts.

Gulp, time to allow you folk to see the web site. Please be patient, doing this type of web site is new to us and we have a lot to learn. But the same can be said about the whole project. Which I guess is why it’s interesting. So when you find things that don’t look right, or are missing, please be patient. Now that I have this “live” I can go back to mechanical design.

Hawaii

I guess I was closer to my project than I’ll be till the end of the month. All the work is being done in China. So we wait. Except for the mechanical design, the software design, the play design and the web page (this one). Getting better at this part.

So it is said, so it is done

So, a few surprises later and we have ordered 10 boards for our project. The surprises, import duties, ouch. And the delivery time, 30 days. But that’s ok, it’s vacation time. And we have software to write and a case to design. Oh and master this web stuff. Like, how do I add a picture to this page ? What are we making, soon, soon.

Time for a commitment

So, we begin with a cliff hanger. Hey I work in Hollywood what did you expect :-)

Also I’m a geek so -> :-) <- you get these too.

The artwork is finished, the parts list submitted, fixed, submitted, fixed. Oh and then new art work.

But now it’s time to push the button and order the circuit boards, and have them assembled.

Not to bad, except we need ten of them, all at once.

And yes I’ve done this before, for much more complex circuit boards,

But never on my own with out a team.

Oh and it’s my own money too.

So it’s different.