Category Archives: Ordering

First order of circuit boards from OSHPark.com

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If you were following comments in one of the previous blog posts I just received my first order of circuit boards from OSHPark.com. This order included version 1 of my button board and a preliminary interface board to connect a variety of sensors and some of my other boards to an Arduino Mega 2560.

I got to experience the “joy” of being one of the initial test subjects for the brand spanking new OSHPark.com site. It actually worked pretty well and was rather impressive in terms of the graphical response you got from it. It would evaluate the files you uploaded and convert them into a graphical rendering of the finished product. When I ran my boards through the system I did notice that the silkscreen appeared to be NOT the rear/bottom view as the site described but instead it was the “Superman X Ray Vision” view. If you’ve used Eagle and a few other competing PCB CAD programs this is what you normally see when working on your board. Your test will be “reversed” or “mirrored” and the holes will be in the positions they would be in from above. It is thus like you are looking through the layers from above. I mentioned this oddity in my comments on the job but don’t know if they’ve resolved it yet by changing the code or changing the description.

The timeline for my order is as follows:

  • May 21st – Placed Order (T=0)
  • May 25th – Tweet @laen replied by @OSHPark reported that the system is not sending notices yet. Indicates board have been reviewed and panelized. (T+4)
  • May 29th – Received official email that said boards on panel for May 31st.  Notice website reports May 30th as panel date. (T+8)
  • June 7th – Received notice saying boards sent to the fabricator. Probably just an update to the software of the site and the boards were sent prior to this point. (T+17)
  • June 8th – Received notice saying boards received from the fabricator awaiting de-panelization. (T+18)
  • June 15th – Boards apparently processed for postage based on postmark. (T+25)
  • June 18th – Received boards. (T+28)

As mentioned I expect most of the dates to be unreliable other than the fact that it took 28 days start to finish.  The site still has not changed from a status saying my boards are waiting to be de-panelized and nothing about being shipped.  Obviously it is a work in progress.

Here is the collection of boards received

First order from OSHPark.com. My Button Pad board and the preliminary interface board to connect a variety of sensors to the external Arduino mega.

The spacing seems to be exactly what the CAD said it would be and the holes drilled seem to be very accurate and centered like they should be including some of the very small vias.  I will need to crack off and dremel/sand off the rough spots from the edges where the boards were connected together.

More pics:

Interface board

Button Pad 1.0 with several buttons placed

Button Pad v1.0

Button Pad 1.0 Top

Button Pad 1.0 Rear

At this time I am waiting for 330 ohm 0603 resistors to arrive.  They were on back order and should arrive in a few more weeks.  Once they arrive I need to use my infrared preheater to heat up the boards and then do a quick solder on each of the resistors before connecting all the various through hole parts.  Once that happens I’ll update with a new photo showing the finished boards.

Ordering…7 inch LCD using SSD1963 graphics board.

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So I’ve decided that the regular Microchip development kit LCD touch screen it comes with is fine for watching results on but ultimately it stinks if I need to interact with the roaster at all.  The only way I’ll get away from this is to order a kit with a 7 inch LCD using SSD1963 graphics controllers.  Why?  One of the issues is really that I would need to interrupt the normal processing and switch control back and forth between various screens.  The PIC would then need to keep tracking the updates and logging them in the background but drawing anything I missed when I eventually go back to the other screen.  This would need to take place regardless if I did leave the screen during a roast but I’d rather keep an eye on everything while I’m changing things in a different portion of the roast control screens.

So to do this I’m attempting to use an SSD1963 graphic controller chip to squeeze a little bit more resolution out of things and going to send it to a 7″ touch screen module that I have on order.  I know there are plenty of projects out there that have demoed a 7 inch touch screen and other 640×480 and 800×480 LCD outputs driven by a PIC32.  MOST of them people keep trying to run video or turn the thing into a full resolution JPEG slideshow.

Everyone pretty much goes on and on about how a PIC32 can’t run much screen and it takes too much time to draw the screens.  Those that tend to say these things keep trying to get the PIC32 to stream video from somewhere which it is not the right kind of system to try that on.  When it involves only drawing graphs and buttons and text responses on the screen the system seems to run just fine in my opinion.  The way the graphics library seems to work these sort of updates are drawn in small sections.  It tells it to go to this position and draw text.  Go here and draw a line.  Go over there and put a dot.

My hope is that once I manage to convert a driver that works with the graphics library and get this thing up and running I can plan out which areas of the screen to update and find an acceptable balance and end up just spreading things out and enabling a few controls so that when I’m reviewing past information and configuring the upcoming roast it shows more resolution and then when it runs live it uses only what it can produce quickly on the screen.

I also think I need to start considering what sort of enclosure I need to use for mounting some prototype stuff into so I don’t have a pile of circuit boards spread out on the counter.  I’ll be needing to use some high voltage stuff soon so it’s safer to firmly mount connectors to a board and then safely mount a circuit board in a way that those ends won’t accidentally be bumped into.  I’m not sure where to begin with.  Obviously I’ll need to find something that I can purchase in single quantities.