I spent a little time on my lunch break putting in the last few wires and the board has come up 🙂
The flash from my phone has drowned out the LEDs on the board, but they were blinking as they should.
Since I didn’t have another voltage regulator handy I have used the voltage drop across two diodes from a bridge rectifier (a trick I’ve used successfully before with other 3.3v parts from Microchip).
I took a few more pictures of the failed boards and sent them to the fantastic people at circuits.io. They have very generously offered to send me new ones at no charge 🙂 Hopefully these new boards will work out.
I also had a quick go at getting one of the boards working. After soldering lots of wires on the bottom of the board I powered it up and let the magic smoke out of my voltage regulator, so it looks like I may have a crook connection somewhere. It could also be because I didn’t have the right regulator available so tried another with a slightly different pinout. I put some heat shrink over the input lead and bent it into the right position. Maybe I didn’t get it quite right. The interesting thing is that the Mac I had it plugged in to didn’t complain about the device drawing too much current, so I don’t quite know what went wrong. Time to head out to Jaycar and get the part I actually need I guess 😉
