LED Matrix PCB
Seen Here: The PCB all soldered, except the ICSP header (forgot that...)
So, today my PCB for the LED matrix arrived from BatchPCB! For what I paid, the PCB arrived fairly quickly - I ordered it on the 15/02 I believe, and it arrived 11/03 -- 26 days, which is pretty good (they state 19 business days).
The quality is very, very impressive - far better than anything I could pull off at home. The silkscreen and soldermask makes it look really nice, too.
Soldering it was a joy, although there was a LOT to solder and it's
all surface mounted.
I had a few problems at first; it wasn't lighting the matrix at all
properly but I soon realised with my new design (transistors on the
cathodes) I have to write the transistors HIGH to get a LOW on the
cathode, so a quick line of code changed to get that working.
Then for some reason the top half of every letter was flipped. It
turns out this was my fault: I messed up when making the package for
the LED matrix in Eagle, swapping the matrix's 5th cathode for my
system's 8th, 6th for 7th, 7th for 6th and 8th for 5th. This was
fairly easy to fix in code, however.
Finally USB isn't working to program or communicate, but I can configure the FT232RL chip (after all, it's sending the clock pulse that's driving my ATmega168). I think I have an idea of what's causing this, but I'm not sure yet.
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