reDOT_smart

in tha SAO Wall hat supercon

Got the new revision working this weekend!. There is still some work to do: The work on the i2c communication is not yet started, but it can already show some hard coded demo texts.

some first image of the new revision some spoilers:

•  change communication to i2c with SAO-style connector on the back
• smaller PCB, bur no 4 Layer (PCB in the image made by Aisler, Ordered also some from OSH-Park but they are stuck in customs) 

And here are some renders of the PCB. I showed them earlier on twitter:

So I decided to push some more work into this Project. Mainly for a firmware an Documentation. To get a< nice entry for "The Return of the Square Inch Project". So updates will follow.....

So there is a follow up project: #reDOT_Matrix !

Please like/follow that project to get updates and support me for the HAD-Prize 2018! 

In that new Project I will put multiple 5x7 Matrixes on the same PCB an controlled by one MCU. I was thinking that there is no use case for me for one digit display and "wasting" one MCU per digit seemed not perfect for me. (although the STM8 is super cheap) 

I now ended up with a version with is reasonable easy to solder:

more information soon

Soldering the 0201 on double sided populated boards was a fail (see last log). But here is the solution: 0402 LEDs. The board will be with 300x390 mil a little bit bigger than the old one (300x340). But hope that the 0402 LEDs are easier to solder. And they are much cheaper also.

The first version of this was planed with 0201 SMD LEDs as I used them on the 0201 version of #reDOT

but there are a few problems:

• my hand-manufacturing yield to bad: with 50 LEDs I had to few to populate all 35 successful
• reworking is quite difficult
• when populating the one side the other side could get messed up, specially the LEDs get de soldered quite fast.

So I decided that 0201 LEDs on PCBs with parts on both sides are out of my specifications. And i will use 0201 only on single sided populated boards in the future.

Here are some of images of the partial working prototype, as you can see some LEDs are missing and some other would need some rework:

But this project will go on: I am working on a 0402-LED version. with nearly the same Form Factor.

Old image/text dump: