Updates: @TomKeddie has given me a bag of the correct USB connectors so we are good there… He also gave me the few 4066 chips he had for IC3 but I’ll still need to get one more for the workshop.
Tonight I started mine so we would have a working board for the build night. @TomKeddie also lent me his compressed air powered paste dispenser and it was friggin fantastic. No more squeezing the tiny syringe of solder till your hand cramps. Now I have to go to China to find one…
However I did still manage to use too much solder on the USB/serial chip and had many solder bridges on it (the pins are very very close together). Got out the solder wick and cleaned it up best I could.
Loaded the bootloader code successfully (yeah!) but the board doesn’t show up when connected via USB so I think I may have some mucked up soldering on the serial chip…
Hey Tom, after cleaning up the serial chip pins it still didn’t work and turned out that there were two small bridges in the USB connector. Cleaned those up and could finally see the board as a com port and see the bootloader version.
All was happy in BP land…
Then whilst the unit was powered up I started looking into the firmware options on my PC. I had the unit jumpered in the bootloader mode and off to the side (power and mode leds were on as expected). All of a sudden out of the corner of my eye I noticed smoke coming from the BP. I kinda jumped and knocked the board onto the floor. When I picked it up I discovered C10 was broken and blackened.
The unit still shows up as a com port so hopefully it was just a bad capacitor. I have a spare but wonder what could have caused the capacitor to give up the magic smoke… I did manage to get the 6.1 firmware running on it and it passes the self test…
All the more reason for me getting a USB smoke test unit working. Also good that I have an older PC down in my workshop in the event such a thing toasted the PC…
Excitement is always a good thing. Perhaps I was a bit too cocky in congratulating myself for finding all the shorts and getting the bootloader working…
Thanks @Packetbob for the pics! Looking good! Is everyone still up for the build night which is in t he calendar for this coming Monday (March 2nd), 7:30 - 10:30 pm.
I’m in…
I’ll bring the reflow oven and the solder paste dispenser for anyone that want to try it…
You still need to hand solder the header pins in and perhaps even the USB connector as I always get bridges when trying these with paste…
I’ll also bring a programmer to load the bootloader into the PIC which you need to do before you can upload the app via USB…
It worked so well that it’ll be tough to go back to any other soldering method. Thanks to @packetbob for the oven and tutorial, @TomKeddie for the paste dispenser and kits, and @Janet for organizing the build night.
I’ve always wanted to try out an oven to solder some parts. Pretty much everything interesting and useful come in SMT packages anyways. I will have to come out to the next build.
Thank you all (specially @packetbob, @TomKeddie, @Janet), it was a great build night. It was even better when I found out that I had the wrong chip size that would fit onto somebody else’s board and their chip (which didn’t fit their board) would fit on my board.
It was my first time doing smd and all the tools made it so easy, I’ll have a hard time going back too.
I recommend we work out some kind of gift exchange with the Shenzhen
Hackerspace to get more of this equipment. Seriously, we must have
something they want
