Monday, August 3, 2015

68b01 boards arrived

The 68b01 clone is close to completion. The v1.1 boards arrived while I was away - they actually arrived before the 1.0 boards as I got bumped to a faster production board by oshpark. 








The reason I did a revision so soon was that I discovered that in order to use interrupts for the kybd line, it had to be part of portb. Unfortunately, while rushing to fix this before going on holidays, I forgot to read the data sheet properly. I have used porta for top switch scanning, but on this particular mcu (the pic18f46k80), only 7 of the 8 pins on porta are available. Worse, the remaining pin is used as a power output pin, which led to some surprises when connecting it to ground. I cannot easily change the chip either, as it is the only 44qfp chip to accept 5v power and have 5v data lines.

In addition to this I somehow forgot to move the pgc and pgd lines. They are now connected to some of the bottom switch data lines instead, which is of course no good. 

On top of this, when I sat down to solder everything, I could not find the proper pin strips and had to make a Frankenstein solution out of sockets and male header pins, and didn't solder some of the pins properly. As a result I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why things didn't work properly.




A lot of rookie mistakes, but I guess that's to be expected when the time available to development are the minutes in between diaper changes, bottle feeding and singing lullabies ;-)

Oh, and I just realised that the VDDCORE line of the PIC18F46K80 must have a 10uF ceramic cap to ground (an electrolytic one has been used in the photo above as I thought it could be the source of some of my problems - turned out I had a spelling error in my code. I meant to write ANCON1 and wrote ADCON1. Since both exist the compiler didn't give me any errors).

I may finally get to try the chip tonight - fingers crossed!

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