Hardware Firmware
JohnP
Toolchain Ishani
Bring the Awesome
Bank holiday weekends, the perfect time to get stuff done! Both fronts advanced quite significantly over the last three days; John will no doubt post an update in due course - the toolchain rewrite is going well, the fundamentals are all in and it’s all so much neater. Decided to give VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 a try, so far so good..
While John diligently revs the hardware, I have decided to refactor the current Badge toolchain into something more elegant and maintainable. The current version is messy and the scripting API is pretty wonky. Have already rewritten most of the Frame class (which defines the pattern on the matrix for a single step of the animation) - building better systems for managing LED state, pushing frame data around the tool more efficiently, responding to changes in a Model-View pattern… much happier with it already!
Holy Macaroni
It’s been a busy year in the 64-pixel space. This enterprising lad is getting dangerously close to The Awesome. He must be stopped congratulated and given a slice of cake.
That said, he and this guy have put together some pretty nice minimal board designs that might need to be plagiarized provide inspiration for the consumer version. I reckon we could knock the parts cost down below ten bucks if we were willing to take this sort of route and give up on rechargeable batteries and the USB connection.
Rev2 boards are on their way to be fab’d.
- Much cleaner main board design with lots of test points on the back for programming and testing with a pin jig.
- Added missing pull-up resistors on the i2c memory bus.
- Removed the fancy (and expensive) navigation switch in favor of two bog-standard SMD pushbuttons.
- Added fancy tabs to the display board for a mounting strap of some sort. The fab house doesn’t do inside routing, so I stacked a bunch of drill hits to make the slot. Hope it works out..
A quick snap of the Rev1 prototype; Although it’s already pretty compact, John estimates we can shave a 1/3 off the height on the next revision.
Ignition! Captured on a Lumix FX150, here’s John’s salvaged Rev1 prototype running a few of the default demo sequences…
Stuff to notice:
+ per-frame controllable brightness, for pulse-y epileptic fun
+ text scrolling - super easy to make, just type words into the Badge tool and it does all the work
+ tasty polar plasma! (3rd shot)
Battery Operation
Things got really hot when I soldered in the battery this morning. Turns out I’d made a silly mistake wiring the charging circuitry. If the battery hadn’t had it’s own overcurrent protection, we might have had a pretty nasty fire. Anyway, one pin-lift and the device is now free-standing.
In other LED news, check out these fancy LED invitations.
The Awesome, Rev 1
It turns out the Rev 1 boards were salvageable after all. Some clever bending of leads, wedging-in of tiny resistors and a couple of green (I use yellow) wire fixes and we’re up and running.
