I thought I post a little bit about my success story on creating my own FEZ Domino boards! Some time ago I ordered a few USBizi144 chips and decided to try to create my own FEZ board. I downloaded the eagle files, created the Gerber files from it and send it to Seeed Studio. A few weeks later my boards arrived!
After I got the courage to try to solder the 144 pin beast onto the board, I was ready to go! I never soldered anything big like this, so fingers crossed! But it went pretty well, I is not absolutely lined out correctly, but he, for a first time
After that I ordered the rest of the parts, with this as the end result! It works!! I’m so happy!!
@ Bec a Fuel: Yep I just recently bought a Aoyue 968 rework station, what a super tool!!
@ randoom: I’m going to calculate that very soon, I like to know it too… but the boards where $40, the Chip was $20 and then the rest of the components, I’ll get back on this as soon as I know it.
@ Guz: Nope, I just wanted to know if I could do it, make a board myself, the next challenge is to add my own alterings to the design, I would love to create a domino with ethernet onboard!
Ok, hopefully some of you hardware gurus can help me out here… I have the following problem. As you know I have created my own FEZ Domino’s everything works great there is only one problem. The 5.0V voltage regulator gets VERY hot, even so hot I have to unplug USB after 10 seconds. I desoldered the LDO and changed it by another one, same problem. Then I took of the 5v LDO of the FEZ Pand (sorry Panda :-[) After I did that everything worked great, nothing got hot anymore!! The LM1117-5.0 I ordered are this ones: [url]http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=250639582092&ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT[/url] Those are actually AMS1117-5.0 but that should make no difference.
Does anyone know what is going on? could it be a faulty badge or something? I ordered the 3.3 LDO’s from the same ebayer and no problems so far!
Question 1: If you are powering the board from USB then the 5V regulator should not be in the circuit at all. You get 5V from USB. There should be a 3.3V regulator though to drop that 5V down to 3.3V. The entire Domino runs from 3.3V, only the USB takes 5V. If your feeding your domino 5V instead of 3.3v then you have a problem.
The other likely problem is that you got your parts from Ebay. There is a 50/50 or better shot that you got bogus parts. A very large percentage of discounted parts coming out of China are bogus, I would not be inclined to trust any such source.
Jeff thanks for your reply, I am powering from USB and if I use the component from ebay, the compnent (AMS1117-5V) is getting VERY hot VERY soon. When I measure the voltage with a multimeter I measure 5V on the output of the AMS1117-5 and 3.3V on the AMS1117-3.3 so no problems there, only that it gets very hot and I have to shutdown the system.
Then I took the LM1117-5 from a FEZ Panda and put it on my self made Domino, the problem dissapears, I still read 5V on the output of the Panda LDO but it doesn’t get hot at all!
I guess I have been on the good side of the 50/50 then many times :D, I have build many boards with components from ebay, even the AMS1117-3.3 I use on the domino is from the same seller and has no problem as far as I can see.
I have send the seller a question I hope he is going to answer, he is a high ranked seller, you think that if he sells bogus parts more people would give negative feedback.
