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- Category: 2022 system (v2)
The boards are assembled, starting with one of the easy ones. The process is easy, clean the board and its stencil with Isopropyl Alcohol (IPA), then place the stencil on top of the board, using other boards to hold everything level, tape it down to stop it moving, then using an old plastic store card, apply solder paste to all of the board, cleaning off any excess as you go. You don't really use much solder paste at all, since the area is very small and the stencils are quite thin (0.12mm thick).
- Details
- Category: 2022 system (v2)
After a couple of days in manufacturing, the PCB's shipped. A couple of days later, they arrived. Now is the time to find out what mistakes I made.
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- Category: 2022 system (v2)
With the printed circuit boards (PCB's) being manufactured in China, there is not a lot to do, other than order the components from the usual suspects, Mouser, Digikey, Farnell, Rapid Electronics and eBay for a couple of TFT displays.
The first thing I'll want to do when they arrive is to build them and try and make them work, only to find out the mistakes I made when I missed things before manufacturing.
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- Category: 2022 system (v2)
With all the planning now done, its time to take the partially completed schematics for each PCB and take them through the whole PCB design process so that the manufacturing process can be started.
With the board specific functionality identified and key components on the schematic, an initial footprint matching the enclosure can be produced and placement of devices into the physical layout can be done. This allows different design decisions to be looked at, including how much space you have, where devices would logically fit best, where are the screw mounting holes, where do the connectors go, etc.
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- Category: 2022 system (v2)
With a hardware and software design principles and approaches all in place and the list of standard processors and IC's defined, I can now look more closely at what goes into each of the core boards