An attempt to make a basic, general-purpose digitizer.
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The digitizer is based around the Maxim Integrated 11040K, a quad 24-bit 64 ksps ADC. I'm not married to this chip, but it seems to offer a lot, and I'm a fan of a lot of the Maxim chips.
My hope is that this project will give me some familiarity with the hardware needed to make a complete digitizer.
I realized a few weeks ago that I had 3 MAX11040K chips lying around that I "needed" to use. They were packed in a vacuum sealed bag, and were supposed to be used by October 2014, a few months ago. I'm not sure why, but they're "moisture sensitive" and require baking out if they've been left in air at all. I really don't want to bake them out, so hopefully it will be okay.
In a first effort, I spent an evening drawing up a quick breakout board in Eagle. I was surprised at just how incapable the autorouter in Eagle was (or at least how poorly I used it?) since the circuit was maximally simple. I ended up hand drawing all of the traces, which wasn't ideal. It got late, and before I had really thought about it, I submitted it to dirtypcbs.com to get printed. I have hand-etched a few boards in the past, but I was worried that the fine pitch of the TSSOP38 (0.5mm) would exceed my sloppy manufacturing capabilities, so I figured paying $14 wouldn't be so bad.
The board is just a breakout, and is completely non-ideal for a lot of things (such as noise...). I just want to be able to talk to a chip, and plan out a circuit around it, then we can move forward with a more complicated and thought-out design.
Sam
Abigale
John Adams
Edward Li
The Big One