Now for my next distraction, I am going to design and then get some boards made up to take up my USBizi144 chips.
I am also going to try Kicad at the same time (because I think that Eagle won’t give me the boardspace I want/need).
Here’s the intent. Create a board that will have a USBizi144 and a Wiz5100 (rather than a Wiz811/812 module socket as the Rhino has). It will have USB Host, will have Micro USB connector for programming. It will have a micro SD card holder. Lots of IOs exposed. I will also be adding some area for an I2C eeprom (DIP8 package rather than SMT, because that’s what I have:)). Form factor is not set on any particular layout at this stage, perhaps a DIP layout might work. It certainly won’t have Arduino layout pins
I will be sourcing parts based on my local supplier (Element 14 Australia) rather than digikey/mouser. I will also be making sure I get parts that while they’re surface mount, they’ll be suitable for hand soldering. I will at least initially intend to get the boards made through Laen or a similar small-run prototyping service.
If anyone has any suggestions about what does or does not work on current boards (Domino, Rhino, or even Panda/Panda2) or other suggestions about what this should look like, feel free to post away. If you have done this exercise yourself and have plans you can share, please also do that !
The end-point I see is this design would also be publically available for anyone else to take and enhance.
One question I am sure that is on everyone’s minds, why, when you can get a Cerb40 for not much more than peanuts? Well again, I have a few USBizi144’s and Wiz5100’s in stock and want to use them, plus its an opportunity to do more than just muck around with a design but to actually make something I will put to use.
constraint #1 = USBizi144, unless you know how I can make that go at 1Ghz lets ignore that for today :). I really meant was there anything you have gathered from previous iterations of Panda/Domino/Rhino that you would do or have done differently, you know, like put a bigger VREG for more current, or something like that…
We made a prototype board by cross design FEZ Rhino and FEZ Mini. You want to use USBizi144 and we used 100. Right now we have a third prototype (this is a side project so not moving very fast). I don’t remember if there were any significant changes but for sure we had problems with the temp of the voltage regulator when not powering from usb. As you can see in the picture this is what the prototype looks like right now… I’m no hardware guy so I can only ask my colleagues if you have any questions. I can also get you the design file if you want.
I can just see it now in Jack Bauer movie, “cut the green wire, it has to be the green wire”
Gralin, thanks for your post, I did remember your IR board (well that’s what I remembered it as :)) but didn’t remember it had ethernet. If your company doesn’t mind about sharing the board files, that would be nice but not essential.
One thing I was definetely thinking about was putting a better power capability in case there were more attached peripherals, and could take a higher voltage input without causing excess heat.
At the moment I’m going through the LPC2388 datasheet to set up all the pin definitions for the part - haven’t started on the footprint part nor on the rest of the circuit Could be a looooong project.
