• Boards, finalized

    Poyu Chen • 12/04/2018 at 07:25 • 0 comments

    After a long break and Thanksgiving holiday, I finally stopped procrastinating and finalized the boards! There wasn't a lot of things changed, I added some grounding vias to the header board and adjusted the silk font size, so they look nice and tidy. Overall, for 3 sets of these costs me exactly $39 USD at OSH Park. If these designs proven to work I can open up a store on OSH Park so you guys can build at home too :D

    If the demand is there maybe I'll sell kits or complete kits on Tindie. But for the mass production version I'll certainly use DirtyPCB to lessen the cost.

    I also need to work more on the software side, maybe this week or the next.

    Stay tuned ; )

  • More Hardware

    Poyu Chen • 11/19/2018 at 17:46 • 0 comments

    In the last post, I said I'll make a "hat" like board for the Pi to provide power and a connector to the OLED board. I did just that this weekend.

    Thanks to Adafruit's Perma-Proto HAT for Pi, which has a perfect form factor for everything we need. I just slapped on the 2pin Molex power connector and the 8pin JST connector and called it a day.

    It look pretty empty now, and I'm deciding whether or not to expose some of the Pi's pins via this board as well so people could hack along. Maybe I'll come up with a redesign this week.

    Here's how it looks like, stay tuned!

  • Hardware

    Poyu Chen • 11/18/2018 at 10:42 • 0 comments

    It's time to finalize the hardware to an actual board. I've just finished designing the OLED and encoder board. I decided to use a 8pin JST connector to connect the board to wire.

    One part I haven't figured out is how to connect this to the Pi's pins. Given that I just ordered around 300 JST connecters from LCSC, I think I'll design another board that connect's to Pi's header pins which will output 2 connecters, 1) a 2pin 5v power and 2) a 8pin OLED connector.

    To mount the board, I have 4 holes on each corner with M2 screw size. As to mounting the Pi to my rack, since I'm using Intellijel's 104HP case, I can use the same rail it uses to mount the power board. The two rails are exactly 7cm apart, and it takes M3 nuts, so I just need to slide it in and screw it on. There will be a "carrier" board to carry the Pi and then that get's screwed to the case. (make sense??)

    Another thing I need to design, is the panel that'll go on the rack. Perhaps I'll design 2 types, one for the Intellijel 1U format the other for the other 1U format. This will also hold a 2 port USB extension cable that'll go to the Pi.

    Anyway, here are some pics

  • MVP works!

    Poyu Chen • 11/14/2018 at 08:45 • 0 comments

    A lot has happen since I first created this project. I figured out how to get the OLED to work on the Pi, I figured out how to get the rotatory encoder to work on the Pi, and then I figured out how to write (better) Python.

    I don't like breadboards so I went straight to building it on a perf board. Looks good too!

    I've created a Github repo for all the code I've written, feel free to check it out. Link is listed on HaD.io project page.

    And here are some progress photos:

    Coming up next, create more views and submenu and tying tying them to system commands!