Recent Posts

• July 21, 2008

  Ifos Assembly Attempt #1

  After assembling the first Ifos prototype based on the new circuit board design, I crossed my fingers and applied power.The good news: It passed the smoke test (nothing exploded, melted, or released its magic blue smoke).The bad news: The heartbea...

• July 20, 2008

  Making Custom Connector Cables

  My PIC programmer has a 6-pin ICSP header that I've been using to program the breadboard prototypes of my Ifos controller.Each prototype has a matching header and I simply connect it to the programmer with a straight-through ribbon cable. For the ...

• July 19, 2008

  New Boards Have Arrived

  Just received my revised Ifos circuit boards from the manufacturer yesterday, so most of the evening was devoted to assembly.The boards themselves look great, with my corrections in place (fixing the DRC errors of the last batch) and no obvious de...

• July 05, 2008

  Not all SSOPs Are Created Equal

  Iturns out making assumptions about chip variants is a bad idea.As I already mentioned, I ran into a little trouble when I assumed the SSOP-28 and SSOP-36 versions of the MAX6957 LED driver were basically the same size, with the 36-pin version bei...

• June 27, 2008

  First PCBs

  Just received the first printed circuit boards for my Ifos project.I used OurPCB, which was inexpensive and fast. Board quality is great—but then I have zero experience evaluating PCB manufacturers. Total cost was $98 for 10 boards (4.15&rdq...