Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Magnetic Rotary Encoder v1.0 Kit build

The PCB high quality just like all the other Bds.
It's a great little kit its as it was WFT kit too. (Works First Time).
I've not used surface mount components for over 20 years.
(Development engineer to firmware / software engineer conversion)

I used an old Weller TCP iron with 22swg multi core solder didn't have flux so tinned all pads except the chip. Borrowed a pair of eye lash tweezers from the better half.
Soldered it with the exception the chip without an eye glass, for the chip I used 3.5x magnification head set (Rolson head set from CPC farnel).
Didn't need solder wick which was lucky as I didn't have any.
I did get all of the components positioned so you could read them left to right ;-)

For any one in the UK .
I made the mistake of buying the Arduino Raw PCB Kit as I had most of bits in the shed I now know buying Zacks full Arduino kit is by far the cheaper and quicker option.

Stepper Motor Driver v1.1 PCBs
Tip: I replaced the 4k7 resistors with zerohms and did not fit the 1nf caps.
For two good reasons I hadn't got any 1nf caps and the application notes for the L298 makes no suggestion of needing to filter ringing on the current sence pins. These components would only be needed if a wire wound 0.5 ohm resistors were used. The L298 application notes advise against using a wire wound resistor.

NB A zerohms is a wire link that looks like an 1/8 w resistor mine are yellow will post a picture of some. they may not be made any more I haven't looked.

Bertha is made from MDF with some old ball-bearing draw slides don't know how accurate this will be, I can't feel any play on any of the axis.

End of my first Dyslexic blog.