DFRobot PCB Service

@ FireyFate - looks good :slight_smile:

You should do a side by side before and after to show how much neater it is :slight_smile:

Board looks good. Did you pay extra for black? All my boards are green because I wonā€™t pay the additional cost for black (Thatā€™s the Scottish habit)

I see you are using the nice little OKI Murata power switching regulators. I have started using them myself but I found that you need a capacitor on the output to clean them up a little. I use 47uF 10V low ESR caps and a 0.1uF ceramic in parallel. Nice and clean.

I also assume you have powered them both from the 12V input? I found that the 3V3 one does not like anything below 7V so wonā€™t work if powered from the 5V supply. I now have a nice wire link on my non-perfect board :frowning:

I assume you have at least 0.1uF caps at each device on the board? I see a you have 16 pin SMD device but I canā€™t see any decoupling next to it. Sorry to be picky but I am a stickler for decoupling caps as a good friend of mine sent me a board years ago with no decoupling on a board with heaps of TTL. I spent a week debugging it before I gave up and fitted caps next to all devices and would you beleive it, it started working. :slight_smile:

If your design is not commercial, would you be willing to post the schematic for comments?

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Like this?

Problem is the breadboard build works better at this point! I was switching the lights with optocouplers rather than MOSFETs thoughā€¦ which gave limited current to the RGB strips. Now the lights are much brighter, but the audio amp that shares the 12V emits noise at the PWM frequency and SD was somewhat working at first but now gives me errorsā€¦

I just hope I can figure out a patch without scrapping the board I already assembled! I like the designing and coding a lot more than I like the solderingā€¦

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That is awesome! I like the side by side, perfect analogy for spaghetti code vs well structured code.

We wonā€™t tell the developers that the spaghetti is working better for the momentā€¦ :slight_smile:

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@ FireyFate - Yeah thats what i meant - much neater :slight_smile:

I know itā€™s too late but what about SPI driven 5v RGB strips?

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Itā€™s only a few dollars more for Qty 10 in black at DFRobot.

I have 22uF 6V caps at both OKI regulators, and both are fed from the 12V input. I guess bigger would have been betterā€¦ The 16 pin is a resistor network just to current limit the PWMs from the Cerb.

The design is quasi-commercialā€¦ sort of an art project where I might sell some custom built pieces. If somebody wants to take a look at the schematic I wouldnā€™t be against emailing it as itā€™s nothing groundbreaking, but I donā€™t really want to just post it.

Just a little update on thisā€¦ I poked around with a scope Wednesday after workā€¦ tried a nice big bench power supplyā€¦ didnā€™t really see anything abnormal on the power. I noticed the PWM whine was gone on the audio amp, but the Micro SD was still not reading. Left work and took the rest of the evening off as a sanity break.

Last night I reformatted the card, plugged it in, and its been working ever since. I guess maybe there was a high impedance connection somewhere, maybe some crud on a pinā€¦ or a strand of wire shorting somethingā€¦ or??? All I know is Im not looking the gift horse in the mouth. The board worked great all eveningā€¦ so even if there is some physical problem with this particular assembly job, I think the design is good.

Now itā€™s time to do the fun stuff. More code! Thanks for the help gents.

Bonus :slight_smile: