23 January 2017

Maxi PCB II

Hurrah! The maxi PCB arrived on Saturday and I've fully populated it with controls. Everything works exactly as it should, which is something of a relief.


At the front are all the switches and rotary encoders together with the display. Not visible are the four VFO Tx/Rx control switch/LED units and the two VFO encoders. These fix directly to the aluminium front panel and are connected to the PCB with header pins.


The back of the PCB has the Arduino Due piggybacked onto the board, behind the LCD display and the two 16 bit switch multiplexers, which are also piggybacked onto the main board. On the left you can see the HDMI ribbon cable which attaches to the display on the other side of the board.



I can now get on with finishing the software, a task that was on hold because I needed the full hardware environment for testing. I'm also working on the Mini PCB, which I am hoping to get into fab early in February, although these things always seem to take longer than I expected. The two aluminium front panels, one Maxi and one Mini are also in for CNC machining.

Plenty to be getting on with ahead of the lecture series planning for April.
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4 comments:

  1. Unknown24 January 2017 at 23:01

    Hi John
    Looks amazing. Cant wait for your PCB designs to become available for some spinoff projects especially for remote stuff. Is this a raspPi Screen with HDMI? Do you connect that to the Arduino or the PC?
    73s 5B4WN

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  2. John Linford25 January 2017 at 13:37

    Hi Marios,

    Well the PCB design is available now if you want it although it sounds like you are using the design as a concept, so perhaps it's really the circuit diagram you want?

    The HDMI screen is often used on RPi but really it's just a small HDMI screen that can be used like any other HDMI device. It connects to the Host controller (PC). Arduino doesn't have HDMI support.

    73, John, G3WGV

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    Replies
    1. Unknown25 January 2017 at 17:51

      Hi John

      thanks for your response. I am aware that arduino doesnt have hdmi support although I was just curious to see whether you discovered a screen that both has hdmi out and supports the arduino. Was the PCB designed in Eagle or something more advanced?

      73s
      Marios 5B4WN

      Delete
    2. John Linford26 January 2017 at 16:37

      Hi Marios,

      The Arduino isn't really designed to support displays, except via the I/O pins, which uses up a lot of pins and is quite slow. This was one of the problems with the Mk I design. In addition, all the processing in the Mk II is done in the host controller (the PC) so it makes no sense to attach the display to the Arduino.

      The PCB was designed by a pal of mine using professional software but I believe it can produce .DXF files if necessary.

      73, John, G3WGV

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