After desoldering the whole thing and doing my best to clean out all the solder from the holes. I was still stuck with slightly obstructed access. Taking two cat5 wires and twisting the ends wasn’t resulting in a great deal of happiness. I just couldn’t get the wires in neatly without 2 or 3 rogue single wires going off in some tangent. So I went hunting for thiner, easier to use wire.
I found a great length of hard drive ribbon wire, must be a good 12″ length. So I’ve started rewiring all of the bits I desoldered. All the 4’s are done, with both the join and the spare length that goes to the breakoff from the shield. I figure tomorrow I’ll get the 2’s done and should be able to make progress with the break off. So I’m aiming for a Wednesday dry run plugging this baby in.
I should have thought this through better. All the edge holes need tow wires to fit in them. One from the inside board and one going to the break-off shield part. Using 22 gauge and the wire doesn’t fit. I have no idea why I soldered all those up without doing teh 2nd wire, I just wasn’t thinking. Now I’m stuck desoldering all the connections. I had a bit of a desperate freak out trying to find thin enough wire. Cat5 to the rescue, it’s almost perfect size. So I’ll be doing this backwards leap this afternoon and this evening. Maybe it’ll be done by tonight and the soldering will be over.
Note to anyone else starting one of these. The soldering of the boards is way harder than the components. So don’t have the feeling you’re almost there when you’ve done with the LED’s, Diodes and the shield. Im my opinion that’s just under the halfway mark of effort.
Tonight Rick (from work) very kindly offered to help me out at work after we were done for the day. In return for beer and pizza he offered kind direction and patiently explained Ohm’s law and other useful things when building electronics.
After our departing colleagues initial mocking turned to fascination (yes Tom you can come to the next one), we got down to business.
We made huge progress.
Rick took total ownership for flashing the Arduino with the Monome serial (something that I think next time round he might document).
I finished off the button PCB’s so all LED’s and Diodes are in. I started on the connections across the boards and got 80% done. I also stormed through the shield which is now totally done.
The last “big” job is the shield break off piece and wiring up the buttons to it. I realized I didn’t have any ribbon cable, so I think I’ll try and swing by IEI tomorrow morning and see if they have anything in stock that looks good.
I have no photo’s currently, but I’ll take my big camera into work tomorrow morning and take a bunch from various angles of the progress.
I’d say we are a very lazily 2 hours from have an unenclosed arduinome.
In his spare time Rick started playing around with his Arduino Mini’s (he has a few). I think he’s going to start looking at something that might be a USB midi device that has lots of knobs on it. Possibly something that will work well with the monome and enhance the capabilities. Could be interesting.
Spent 20-30 minutes last night getting all the LED’s in place and soldered. Just need to get the diodes in and then we’re onto the shield. No pictures I’m afraid, I’ll get some tonight.
I also found some nice and simple sparkfun PCB testing techniques to check for shorts. Probably all very 101, but I’ll work out how to relay the information and get it up here in case anyone else at my level is wondering the same thing.
I had a quick look over the unsped shield, slotted in some of the headers, but many of the holes in the pcb seemed alien to me, so I need to do some research and see if anyone has a good how-to for which components go where.
Only had a couple of minutes this evening, but was keen to get the ball rolling so I soldered the diodes on one of the sparkfun boards.
Super easy going. Diodes are very clearly marked on the sparkfun pcb. There was a lot of legs to cut off, and I think I may need to go over them again later so they don’t stick in the buttons.
Next up is the LED’s. Which seem fairly safe as well. I also found a nice way to test for any shorts in my soldering (yes I still don’t trust it). With the diodes being uni-directional for current. If once it’s soldered in, take your meter on the ohm setting and touch the legs that if you can only get a reading in with your meter in one direction (i.e. red on the left one, black on right, then switch), you should be able to confidently say that you don’t have any cross leg solder shorts.
I’m hoping that once I have the LED’s and the diodes in place that there is some fairly simple means to test the connections — or maybe by then I might be more trusting of my soldering – it is easy going so far.
Didn’t have time to set up the timelapse, but I’ll get that sorted for tomorrows progress report.
Had a long weekend off over the weekend, so didn’t get much work done on the Nome, spent a lot of quality time at the beach or in restaurants.
I did get a chance to do some soldering warm up, whilst picking up a new soldering iron, I grabbed a couple of quick $10 velleman kits. I put together a metronome, which was a nice challenge due to the header for the chip, so hopefully that will have got some of the muscle memory back.
I now have all the parts I think I need, I’ll compile a static page to list them all over the next few evenings.
I’m planning on spending an hour or so every evening this week, working on LED’s and diodes. So aiming for next weekend having a finished unenclosed arduinome.
In true geeky fashion I’ve been thinking I might record timelapses of the process using gawker. But more on that later.
OK, so I was missing diodes, so I’m ordering these from sparkfun, based on info over at Julien Bayle’s site.
I’m also now thinking that based on my LED’s “Current – Test: 20mA” and “Voltage Rating 3.2V”.
So the way I’m reading it. I should be getting a 24.5k? – 28k? resistor.
I’ll probably pick a handful up from the local Radio shack – I’m assuming that resistors are fairly common and it’ll be easier to get them there rather than ordering online.
