Softlabel

Project shelved for the moment - I have better things to do and no motivation to do this, might pick it up again later.

Just to head off the inevitable criticism, no I'm not sour over the HAD Prize, not getting in is actually a blessing, this time of year work gets nuts and I have so many other cheaper (free) things to do and get done.

So, after a week or so of arguing with Altium CircuitMaker, I have a schematic, I'm not entirely sure it's 100% correct, and I'm quite positive I want to go back to using Eagle (and may still do that) not that I have a lot of experience with Eagle either.

If anyone wants to take a look at - http://demo.fremnet.net/softlabel.pdf - and offer any criticism/suggestions, I'll gladly take them - It's one thing to take a bunch of components and jumper them together...

It's half arduino reference, half repaper reference. Regulating the usb5v to 3v, and ditching all of the repaper voltage conversion.

All my source code is lost - I blame the Windows 10 upgrade and Disk Cleanup utility, don't ask the Disk Cleanup utility to clean up old installs unless you've copied your documents *off* the PC, not just out of the windows.old directory. I have backups, I just have to find them, and TBH it'll probably be quicker to start over anyway.

So, I'm about half way through my schematic, it's tough with the amount of free time I get but it's coming along.

Giving Altium CircuitMaker a go, normally I'd use Eagle but I figure I'm so far out of practice it doesn't make much difference either way.

Have decided to compromise, in order to be lazy and keep using ATmega32u4 - Mostly for the simplicity of built in USB - frame buffering will be done on the host and streamed via the MCU to the EPD.

I could render the frame for a 2 inch EPD on the MCU but it uses 2.4k out of the 2.5k of memory so it's just going to be easier this way - it'll be faster than relying on external flash and a lot simpler than picking a bigger MCU and working out USB.

So I've gotten as far as I want with the dev board from Seeed, I've just recieved a new one (RePaper) from adafruit - it has better libraries (less coding work/rework) and a BOM that's much closer to what my board will have - though I intend to ditch the flash if I can.

Can't wait to get home tonight and play with it.

I've aquired the components to prototype the job at hand and spent a good couple of hours working on it.

Turns out that the libraries provided by seedstudio aren't the greatest, am going to have to write my own to get the V230 EPD working on this development board on this atmega.

Their libraries work fine on a Leonardo with it's atmega32u4, but it's horrifically slow and requires an SD card as a frame buffer - I want to avoid the frame buffer if I can, hence Arduino Mega 2560, but if I can't work the code out for that....

Final product will either be an atmel chip with enough memory to handle the frames, or use an SPI flash chip - I am probably going to ditch the GT20L16 font chip that's on the demo board in the final product too.

Long story short - all the parts work, they just don't work together - yet.