Sunday, January 25, 2009



The PCBs for the relay board finally arrived from BatchPCB. (Well, I should say I finally got them; Turns out they were sitting the mailroom at work waiting for me to pick them up for about 2 weeks. Oops)

Pic is a raw board on the right, and a fully assembled board on the left. The board went together fairly easily.

I tried to use the SMD oven for the first time in anger, and was mildly annoyed to find that it doesn't quite reach the melting point of the lead-free solder I'm now using. Dammit. I need to get a toaster oven or similar.

So I just hot-air soldered all the SMD components, and then hand-soldered all the through hole components. A lot of soldering! Took most of an hour to solder it. ( Some 123 thru-hole solder points).

Interestingly, I managed to get a dry-solder on one of the SMD components. I suspect I managed to just not put enough solder paste on it, but it's a first for me. I fixed it by hand-soldering; Good thing it was an enormous 0.8mm pitch component.

Board is now plugged into an ATNGW100 and it looks like it's working well. I can read temperature from a DS18B20+ that's attached to one of the 1-wire interfaces, and the board hasn't caught fire. Yay!!

When I get time later today I'll do the spot of programming to talk to the GPIO pins and start testing the relay drivers, RS422, and SPI interfaces.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Michael,

I have a home automation project that needs something like this. Would you consider selling me a board or two? (either assembled, just the PCB or even just the eagle files). *Please* let me know one way or the other:

smith (dot) winston (dot) 101 (at) gmail (dot) com

Michael said...

Belated gotten around to posting these files.

See http://sites.google.com/a/dgmo.org/home/Home/boards