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Month: February 2015
Drawing out a pin out helps
Code breakout is ready!
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- The wizard’s magical solder-goo
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- Some solder goo the wizard used.
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- Goo under the microscope. Tiny tiny solder balls suspended in flux!
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- James’s wand! Tip: place some goo on the thermal pad, and use that to get the solder on the pads.
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- Baking oven! Temperature profile spanned around 70-95 degrees C in ~15 minutes.
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- Inside the oven.
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- James did a visual inspection to check the contacts under the microscope. Next, I tested for shorts. We ended up shorting VDD and RESET.
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- Attempt#2 at grounding myself. Probably didn’t help.
How-to get your codec on the PCB:
1. Find an electronics wizard as awesome as James
2. The wizard will usually have a soldering paste in his fridge
3. The wizard will bring some of this paste out, and place it on the PCB with the precision of a surgeon
4. Bake the mounted PCB in a solder-reflow oven
5. Do a visual inspection to check contacts
6. Check for shorts using a multimeter
7. Solder on header pins (that’s what I got to do!)
8. Breadboarding next!
Our first PCB
Special thanks to James for being so careful with these tiny traces! He tinned the board too, giving it the nice silvery look. Now to the bread boarding stage (which might be a terrible idea), and we’ll be moving to the audio cape and and parts next (parts should be ordered soon!)
Putting the codec on the cape, one pin at a time
Now that I have had my fun with hiding away the datasheets, the goal for tonight is to actually push through and complete the codec part of cape. 32 pins and a ground pad: lets see how this goes!
I2C: connecting SCL and SDA to BBBlack’s P2.19 and P2.20, respectively
Mics: (making room for our binaural mics!)
On looking to separate the analog and digital ground planes:
If this the community I belong too, I’m okay with that 🙂
I2C for the codec
I2C tutorial: [ Michael Lenard ]
Interesting graphics: [ fritzing ]
[ bonescript | example | example | oLEDÂ example ]
BBBlack and OSX
[ Bootstrapping BBBlack ]:Â There are four methods to connect to the board: USB Serial, FTDI Serial, TCP over USB and Ethernet.
For some reason, installing the drivers didn’t seem to get the connection up and running. I kept re-installing the drivers, restarted my computer, nothing. I went into network settings and removed the “not configured” BeagleBone Black connections (I had ended up with two of these!) — still nothing. I powered off the BeagleBone and brought it up again, re-installed the Network driver, and boom. Its coming up now. So we can test I2C while running Eagle in an adjacent window. So much for convenience 🙂
BBBlack: Hello World LED flash
This is probably the fifth LED flash of this semester. mBed, R-Pi, Arduino Uno, ezDSP C5515, and now BBBlack. I also borrowed an Edison and we can get to some LEDs coming out of that next? No…enough platforms for now. FPGAs should be coming next anyway!
Fun fact: the curious http://192.168.7.2 address only responds *after* BBBlack’s drivers have been installed. Ha. I liked assigning R-Pi’s IP myself, lets try it on this as well.
I’m really happy about using USB and not the ethernet cord at this moment.
JavaScript now. Wow. Python, C, and now JS. Perhaps I should also start going through Khan Academy’s lessons…
Anyway, Cloud9 looks very interesting! mBed’s cloud based IDE shows up in a new form…
And the LED is flashing alright. I’m just a bit terrified about going from this LED flashing to programming a C5515 through this same board. Well.
Where’s the ground port!
I can tape this to my laptop’s chassis and plug the power supply in. But I won’t really need that for working with BBBlack. So lets just keep the strap on for fun.
Aside: Guthman / Moog design challenge
We interfaced a midi controller with the Moog werkstatt! Couldn’t get midi to work during the hackathon, so we just took the USB out and used the switches on the guitar. Lots of fun with floating pins and pulling voltages high/low.
