aaand here it is! the OLED board came in today. I will be building it up over the next few days, I have GOT to get the bugs shaken out of the Morlock boards so I can start shipping them.
Sweet, thank you sir!Oh pbjosh: I tested the board down to 2.9v and it ran no problemo.
aaand here it is! the OLED board came in today. I will be building it up over the next few days, I have GOT to get the bugs shaken out of the Morlock boards so I can start shipping them.
For me, it's going in my Evil M as a replacement for the Ego board I have right now
Destroyed two of them trying to solder that damn .5mm pitch header.
DAMN that thing.
third one was the charm. I can't hand-solder that prat with any reliability, at least not without some more practice. I am putting together my own reflow soldering machine, always wanted to do that, all ya need is a toaster oven, a thermocouple, and a DNA board
So what is the holdup on Morlocks? I'll tell ya. I was all ready to put the whipped topping and cherry on top and ship them when I tried something I shouldn't have, I plugged it into a USB port on a machine OTHER than the one I was developing on. It did not work. not even close. It turned on but would not communicate.
After some hair-pulling I figured out that occasionally (about one in 30) times the communications fails, this is way more than enough to torpedo my 66-byte communications packet, and also explains why the device sometimes wouldn't even enumerate properly.
All I can figure is the V-USB software is a little flakey, and if the USB controller is marginal then it occasionally fails. great. so how do I do.. well ANYTHING with that factoid? How do I upload code which must be 100% perfectly accurate? fun little problem.
The good news is I think I have a solution, the amazing news is that when I realized what I had to do, it made the bootloader way simpler, and actually shrunk it by almost 128 bytes! I was able to free up two full pages of code for the user. it was a "DUH!" moment.
I am going to send a checksum with every command is all, and instead of sending whole code pages, I will send just one word at a time. A lot of round trips? well yeah but at 1.5mbit who cares. so the bootloader takes a few seconds to upload instead of instantly. pff.
When I did this I realized I no longer needed the data-stream marshalling code. so I pitched that. No longer needed the code checksum since I am checsumming every word that goes in. pitched that. No longer need to worry about addresses and positions since I can drive that on a transactional basis directly from the PC, and I don't need to worry about order since the nature of the solution is stateless! pitched all THAT code.
and *poof* new origin is at 0x1900 up from 0x18C0, interrupt handler-for-mac and all! Again I guess I am glad I had a plan to upload new bootloaders
I will need to wring this code out on different hardware to be sure it's going to work anywhere, but I suspect it will be no worse than the bargain-basement travel-hub I plugged it into on my 'upstairs' box. I'll keep you aware.
Button board fully checked out, once I get samples in of the new (lower profile) switch I want to use, and re-re-re-check the design I am going to order a pre-production run of 30 or so. same goes for the OLED board, I will have 10 ready for shipment in 45-60 days. Sorry for the delay on them but I am only one person! concentrating on getting Morlock/DNA boards out the door right now, and like the plan always was, the other boards will plug directly into it when they arrive
Do you have a hot air rework station? I have a lot more luck with them, so much so that I turfed out my modified toaster oven. You can replace individual components and do double-sided work more easily.
I'm actually tempted to see if you could run an old Intimidator off this (either with a button board on the back or something else ingenious).
Since Tadao isn't producing anything right now, it could beat Virtue feature wise.
never worked with a hot-air rework station, which would you reccomend?