I submitted another order with the wonderful
Dorkbot PCB prototyping service a few weeks ago, and promptly got it back the usual 14 days after ordering it. From top to bottom:
- The second spin of the SerialCouple thermocouple ADC board. Given a thermocouple connected to the right side of the board, this board will convert it into ascii values and feed it back over the standard 6 pin FTDI serial connector on the left at 9.6k or 115k. This board corrects a few problems with the first revision; namely the MISO/MOSI pins between the AVR and MAX31855 being reversed (which was correctable in software, but sloppy), and the board missing all of my custom silkscreen, which I had very carefully placed on the wrong layer in Eagle.
- The board on the right is a relatively simple breakout board from the GoodFET connector to a five pogo-pin bed of nails targeting the IM-ME. I did integrate a forward diode to drop the power supply from 3.3V to the 2.5V the IM-ME normally runs on, but I'm not sure if that's even required.
- The final board on the bottom is the next step in my IR communications experiments. It has an MSP430G2452 connected to a 38kHz IR receiver, a constant current IR LED driver (borrowed from the DP USB IR toy), and all of PORT1 brought out to an edge connector meant to be plugged into a breadboard or as a daughter board for other projects. The 4 position DIP switch onboard is meant for being an address set, such that several of these boards could be deployed as addressable general purpose 8 bit I/O boards. They could then be used to build a small inter-room telemetry network for controlling lights or turning on computers without WoL, or anything else that could be sent over 1200 baud or less. I will certainly be posting about this more once I have a few of them talking to each other, but I wouldn't expect that to happen with my current summer schedule.
And would you
look at all that beautiful silk screen on the back; with my name and everything!
My summer internship has been keeping me as busy as ever, and I see no foreseeable chance to get back to my electronics workbench in Davis before school starts, so I'm afraid I'm going to be spending most of the summer doing little more than pining over these unpopulated boards. The next
Electronics Flea Market is in two weeks, so anyone in the area should come out and say hi, either in the parking lot at De Anza or at the breakfast at
Bobbi's afterwards (around 9:30am).
