Solar Empire

All the stuff finally came in to try making my ADC board. Here it is:

The board

The mess

This board is intended to be a general purpose lab DAQ board. Depending on how you set the resistors in the jumper slots, you can sense current, voltage (up to +/- 10V), and set the gain into the ADC and analog output. You can even route the analog output to something else. The way it is designed, it is +/-600V common mode tolerant and has a 130kHz bandwidth. (The main bottleneck being the high voltage differential chip)

Other features include:

• The world’s worst SMD solder job.
• Mysterious voltage divider behavior.
• A broken signal generator, so I had to test it with batteries.

:-P. I can fix that. It seems to work though, which is pretty good for my second PCB project.

Design Files:

Kicad Files

If you are ever in California, there are a few things you really need to see. When my parents visited in April, we went up to Sequoia national forest. It really is a wonder of the world!

(I only recently got around to posting these, because disorganization:)

I managed to assemble one of the breakout boards that came in the mail from OSH-park today. (I screwed up the other two … but 1/3 appears to be assembled and working correctly.)

Here you can see the board attached to an STLink_v2 programmer, with pin PB0 connected to an LED.

I hear now that the Thai navy seals have rescued 8 of the children trapped in the cave. Here’s hoping that the remaining children and their coach can be rescued. Good luck.

Update on 11 July: They’re all out and safe! Hooray.

CNN’s story on the matter.

I made a simple breakout board for the STM32F732 microcontroller. I wanted the pins to be arranged in something like an organized fashion. The pin groups are arranged by name and function (PA0-PA15, PB0-PB15, PC0-PC15, and various control pins.) The STLink programmer should be able to plug right into the top-right four pins to program the controller. The controller should be easily powered by supplying 3.3V and ground to the VCC and GND pins on the top right.

This resulted in a bit of complexity in the routing (which you have to do by hand in KiCAD – no autorouter). I figured out a technique to make it all fit on the board. OSH Park came back with a price of $38 for a minimum run of 3 of these circuitboards. In two or three weeks, I’ll see how well this breakout board works.

This is part of a proof-of-work that I understand PCB technology, microcontrollers, and PCB CAD software. I’m not an electrical engineer by education, but I’ve picked up quite a bit of it in my work. The KiCAD project files can be downloaded from my site: STM_simplebreakout.zip

PS – yes, I know the ground plane is broken up, and held together by traces. This is my first attempt – I may be able to clean it up a bit in post.

How much solder would a solder wick wick if a solder wick could wick solder?

I still have no idea how to get these things to work …. 😛

This device will not self destruct in 10 seconds (fingers crossed). So what is it?

It’s a super-computer! Well, okay, not entirely. It *could* be a cluster supercomputer, if these raspberry pi’s came with more ram. Each board actually has enough processing power to make a decent cluster. However, each board only has 1GB worth of RAM, and there’s no easy way to upgrade this – the architecture of these single board computers isn’t very extendable in that respect.

If you could get a raspberry pi with expandable memory slots, or if each came with, say 8GB of RAM, you could chain them to form a very nice supercomputer cluster.

So why do I want it? (Because I’m a neeeerd.) It is set up like a supercomputer. Right now I have the one head node (hedgehog), and two computing nodes (hedgehog_n1 and hedgehog_n2). I intend to play around a bit with the high performance computing software libraries (MPI, petsc, and so on) at use at work on a “supercomputer” that I own and control. I also want to further self-educate on how to set up, administer, and write software for supercomputers.

Further evidence of my nerd credentials: Stare into the abyss that is my desktop. Yes – that is an image of several VNC sessions with the nodes of my device, running inside a linux virtual machine, running inside my main windows PC.

Computers all the way down!

The total cost of this project, btw, is ~$150. If I want to start throwing together a real supercomputer, I imagine the software and architecture will be the same, I’d just need to upgrade the hardware. (There are nice higher power small-form-factor fanless computers available from IBM, but they’re more expensive.) I figure I’ll shake the software products out first, then scale up.

Finally found where I had stashed these photos:
October 2017: I’m reassembling my electronics lab in the new house I’m renting.
Here is that 3d printed dowel-truss shelf that I made. I wrote some python scripts that create STL files for dowel-truss brackets. You specify the nodes, it gives you what to print, then you cut the dowell rods and assemble.

Electronics Lab

Here is the older, messier version: 2016

These are some pictures taken at the petrified forest, as I traveled from Ohio to Palmdale CA for my new job. I actually zigzagged around the country a bit to visit some friends and family in Kentucky, Colorado Springs, and Los Alamos.

Pictures were taken 26 Sep 2017. It’s been about a year: I really need to buckle down, sort these things and post them, like I told myself I would. 😛