Saturday, June 11, 2011

LED Controller board, rev. B

I tried checking out the new (rev. A) controller board earlier this week, with no success.  A bit of diagnostics showed that the ground layers weren't switching and further research provided the reason: the SOT-89 package for the transistors didn't match the pins of other packages for the same device.

I'm not sure how I ended up making this mistake, though I suspect what happened is that I originally did the schematic assuming a different package, and failed to verify the pinning after making the change.

The picture shows the cube with the prototype boards (brown), with the SMT rev. A board behind (green).  Mostly for a size comparison.  Unfortunately, there probably aren't any packages of similar size and matching pinning that I could use to replace what I have.  This means that I'll have to make another order of boards, which will at least have all the tweaks I've done since learning from my mistakes on the rev. A board.  Hopefully, there won't be further mistakes requiring new boards as at $100 per run, the cost adds up in a hurry.

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