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Next up was the logic board – the one containing all of the ICs. There were no particular layout requirements for this board other than the positioning of the header pins at the top and the large screw holes, so I tried a few different iterations of component placements before settling on the one shownContinue reading “The Logic Board”

I have never designed a circuit board before, so this was quite a tricky undertaking! I did some research online, and the general consensus is that the most important step in board design is component layout. Ensuring that components are arranged in logical groups with signal flow taken into account will minimise the length ofContinue reading “The I/O Board”

The next step was to design my circuit board layouts using the schematic I had designed, but unfortunately I quickly came to a frustrating realisation – Fusion 360 will not let you create multiple boards from one schematic! This meant that I had to split my schematic in two – one half for the I/OContinue reading “Splitting the Schematic”

I now needed to document my full circuit plan as a schematic, so that this could then be converted into a circuit board. I used a piece of software called Autodesk Eagle, and then moved across to its big brother Fusion 360 as this has a free student licence – wahoo! I had to doContinue reading “The New Schematic”

Last week I built another prototype of the module on stripboard. As designing and building stripboard takes ages I didn’t do the whole thing, but just a single lane of the sequencer and all other ancillary circuits. The input circuits and voltage limiting worked perfectly, but the output circuits were outputting a rather wimpy 4.2VContinue reading “Stripboard Prototype, Lessons Learned and a Slight Redesign”

I have not posted on this blog in seven days. That does not, however, mean that progress has not been made! In fact, the opposite is true – I have been working on the design so much that I have not found the time to post about it as well, so my next few postsContinue reading “A Frantic Week!”

Today I tested a couple of the circuits from my previous post with the diodes and transistors that had arrived over the weekend. I made a couple of small tweaks but nothing groundbreaking. My big job for the day was creating a scale model of the faceplate in CAD, to allow me to figure outContinue reading “CAD – Faceplate mk1”

Today was another busy day – I completed the majority of the code for the module, and also worked on plans for some of the analogue circuitry required! The ‘Next Step’ and ‘Reset Steps’ input buttons now function, and the module can step through sequences and blink the yellow LEDs at the appropriate times. OnceContinue reading “Primary Coding Complete”

My multiplex chips turned up as planned, and so I really got stuck in today. Firstly, I rebuilt my ISP (programmer) onto a piece of stripboard. This is something I will need to use a lot in the future, so building something a little more permanent made a lot of sense. It also freed upContinue reading “A Productive Day!”

Amazon Prime is a wonderful thing. My ATMEGA328p chips turned up yesterday so I have managed to get a good start on the prototype mk2 build. Firstly, I needed to be able to burn my code onto the 328 chips, so I built this programmer board, which uses an Arduino NANO. It took me aContinue reading “Back to Breadboard”