Submitted to be manufactured!

The design for my PCB has been submitted to be manufactured. It will take about 20 days for me to get the actual PCB back from the manufacturing process. I'll be sure to post pics once it arrives :)

rev 01b

I've hooked up the video input and output ports. I decided to use BNC plugs for now because a) the LD-V1000 has a BNC output, and b) trying to mount RCA jacks on PCBs seems hard, and c) I already had a pre-canned BNC plug part so I felt the chances of success were greater.

The bottom image is the "gerber" representation. This is what gets sent off to the PCB fabrication house to be err.. fabricated :) Unless I can see (or someone else can see) a defect in my design, I'm pretty much ready to send this thing off and see what happens. My expectations should be that it won't work but that I need to go through this step in order to get a good design. It will cost about $32 to make one of these and take 3 weeks. Does anyone else want one? :)

Schematic finished? ... :)

I created the part for the LD-V1000 connector (including the size dimensions which was surprisingly fun) and added the rest of the parts. Looking at the schematic, this thing seems pretty complicated. I guess the STK600 shields a lot of the complexity. Next step is to create the PCB layout from this schematic... or should I try and add the VP931 connector on here first? I really want to play around with the PCB layout... :)

Started on the VLDP-HW schematic...

I found pre-canned parts for the AVR, the MAX232, and the LM1881. Note that the AVR is labeled as an ATMega644P but it is the same size as the 324P which I intend to use. Even with 40 pins, space seems tight, so I think moving to the 40 pin model up from the 28 pin model is a wise move.

I doubt I will be able to find a precanned part for the LD-V1000 connector so I will probably have to *gulp* make that one from scratch. To quote Zed, "nothing is ever easy".

Learning how to make a real PCB

I followed this tutorial and this one and made these. Having the pre-canned "parts" was very helpful. If I can find "parts" for all of my components, that would be nice.

Last night I uploaded some more rescued Microzine disks

Microzine #23, #29, and #30 are now available. Right here.

Microzine #40 has read errors and I don't know whether I will be able to recover it. It depends on how many sectors are bad. (there may be duplicate files on each of the four sides)

Can't reproduce problem in simulator

I fed in the string of LD-V1000 bytes that seems to caused a crash into the AVR simulator and it did not crash. This probably means that I will need to use a hardware debugger to see what the ploblem is.