Now for real, the circuit is finished, and I have started with assigning and creating the footprints for the components. There are no one major updates this week, but rather a lot of changes and modifications to the schematics. As usual, here is the visual diff for this week. Additions Read more…
Good news everyone, the circuit is finished 😀 ! Well, not so fast! Now everything is connected, but there are some last minute modifications to the circuit that were introduced just now. I will work on those first thing next week, and hopefully, I will start with the PCB layout. Read more…
I continues working on the schematics this week. By now, almost all the major components in the circuit are connected. Last week I connected the Ethernet jack, SD card, and some of the microcontroller connections. This week I did the connections for the USB port power pins, FPGA I/O ports, Read more…
In our PCB, we have an FPGA, and PIC18 microcontroller. It is our intention to share one oscillator between the two ICs, hence reducing the cost, and sparing the PCB precious area. This post will discuss the problems that might occur, and what configuration we are using. Problems can occur Read more…
In the first two weeks of the project I was reading and trying to grasp the basics of PCB design and KiCAD. This week I put this knowledge into action and finally started with creating the schematics for the project. The board we are designing contains an FPGA (spartan-6), PIC18 Read more…
Resuming from last week, I continued working on the PCB design for our product. Last week I talked about my experience with learning the basics of designing PCB layout. The first half of this week I studied Xilinx’s PCB design guide for the FPGA, while I focused on creating the Read more…
Have you ever been thrown into the middle of ocean, and you don’t even know how to swim? Well, I have lived this experience, both literally and figuratively. This week it was the latter! But let me assure you, it felt exactly the same both times. Therefore, I am writing Read more…
This was relatively a short week, as today is Thursday and Friday is a public holiday. Moreover, yesterday we left the office at noon to have a farewell dinner for one of the interns and we did not return to the office afterwards. Simply put, the objective this week to Read more…
The functionality of the Inkscape extensions was almost finished last week. Most of the work I’ve done this week was optimization and modification to different parts of the application. Some of these changes were made to the Witty application (in C++) and some were made to the extensions (in Python). Read more…
I continued working on the the Inkscape extensions that I started last week. I worked on improving and modifying some of the functions of the extensions to make the process of creating components graphics easier. But before that, we had to design and establish a naming convention for naming the Read more…