parts should arrive today

The parts from digikey should arrive at 4pcb.com today and they are due to finish the bare PCBs tomorrow which means that should start assembly on Monday at the latest. This means that assembly should be finished no later than Monday the 16th of January since I ordered a 10 day turnaround on the assembly. I guess this gives me time to work on the software side of things. It would be cool if I could get some pics of the boards now just so we all can get excited.

Some parts ordered and sent off to be assembled

The rev 2 PCB's themselves will be done within a few days. I've also ordered assembly services from the company who made the PCBs for some of the surface mount IC's. This means that they will place 9 of the ICs that would be very difficult (or impossible) to hand solder. The rest of the components will be hand solder-able.

At this point, it looks like each prototype board with those 9 parts already placed will cost between $80-$90 and that is before buying the remaining parts. As for the remaining parts, I will publish a Bill of Materials and people can order what they want from the list (not all parts will be required so people will be able to save some money if they are only interested in a subset of the board's functionality).

Rev 2 PCB's _ordered_ !

I have ordered 10 revision 2 PCBs. They should be done in a few weeks.

Six of them are spoken for already. If you are interested in one of the remaining four, and are willing to accept the risk of the board not working properly (or at all) in exchange for the chance to try out one of these boards early, let me know.

Gerber files generated

Getting close to ordering a batch of these things. Anyone else want one? :)

Experimenting with ground plane

Now that everything is routed, I'm trying to add a few ground planes. Here's what I've got so far.

WIP 19 Dec 2011, everything routed!

Everything is now routed except the GND lines which will be handled by a plane. Getting close!

Canon AVCHD 24p Pulldown Removal

So our old Canon HV10 HDV camcorder was aging and the firewire port on it doesn't seem to work anymore, so it was time to get a new camera. We got a Canon VIXIA HF M41 which is pretty awesome because it has 32gb of internal flash memory (no more HDV tape dumps via firewire port!).

So I noticed while playing with the new camcorder that it can record in "film" mode (24 frames per second). This seemed like a neat option to have if I ever wanted to make my own music videos or laserdisc-styled games so I started trying it out only to discover that Canon saves all videos at 60i for some silly reason. It can be converted back to 24p but only with some effort. Groan.

So I decided to undertake the challenge and eventually found this page. It got me most of the way there, but I was still stuck at a few parts.

Here is what I did to finally get unstuck and get wookin' (and thanks to Warren for spending time helping me with this also!) :

I had to also install the this package in addition to ffdshow (I may not have enabled something properly on ffdshow, I dunno):

For ffdshow, I did not need to enable deinterlacing (in fact I suspect this should be avoided), nor did I need to choose ffmpeg-mt (although this may speed things up and doesn't seem to hurt anything).

My AVS template needed to be modified and looks like this:

### Batch Intermediate Inverse Telecine Template
###
### Requires: TIVTC.dll

Directshowsource("__vid__",pixel_type="yuy2")
tfm()
tdecimate()
AssumeFPS(24000,1001,sync_audio=true)
###Lanczos4Resize(1920,1080)

Also, my Batch Intermediate Creator prefs look like this:

WIP 14 Dec 2011

Started wiring up DB25 port (tricky!) and slimmed down the 5V tracks from 0.04 inch thick to 0.03 inch thick to make a little more room.

Today's WIP

Almost done routing this thing!

Another WIP for today

Did some more work. Got most of the LEDs routed and got the LD-V1000 port mostly routed also. Will try to fill in the big gap between the DB25 port and everything else as I see how much room I will have.

today's WIP

Here is today's WIP screenshot.

I've moved things around temporarily while I work on the routing. It is like solving a complicated puzzle.

Another revision today

A few minor tweaks. Warren pointed out that the diagnose and mode buttons do not need pull-up resistors because the AVR can provide internal pull-ups. I also tried to align things a bit better.

Dexter WIP 1 Dec 2011

My latest WIP. I've moved the right side of the board in a little bit and moved the PR-8210 jack from the top to the right side. I've also used up the remaining free LEDs which is interesting because we originally thought we couldn't possibly use all of them. :)