Author: sgeorge, Posted on: 3 October 2015 16:41
Doing some PCB testing. Its a bit of a chore as one board relies on the other board etc.
Anyway, I have tested firing and PWM'ing LEDs inplace of solenoids for the moment, since I converted the original PCB from using a Parallax Propeller microcontroller to a PIC32, I had to mostly rewrite all the solenoid code, but it looks like its good to go. I had it pulsing LED's away with a PWM cycle.
The screenshot from the oscilloscope is me testing the master control board doing RS485 at 156250 baud (which is basically 19kb per second), which is a LOT of data, but its also one of those magic numbers that fits into the time cycle of the UART with 0% error margin!
I'm sending test data through repetitively, 3 byte sequence of 0x55, 0xAA, 0x00.
So now the plan is to finish writing up the framework on the master board (quite a bit is written), take some switch inputs and then I'll cable the master and solenoid board together with some cat5 and we'll see how things go sending switch data packets over the RS485 bus.
Once that is nailed down, we'll hook up a real flipper to the solenoid board and see how that goes.
tags: PCB, System Shock
| Robert said on March 22, 2016 21:31:54; | |
| Hi Stu! Hope everything is going well with the machine. The boards are looking killer! :) | |
| Stu said on April 06, 2016 09:34:50; | |
| Thanks, life is so busy, wish I was further along but things are going well. I really need to post another update! | |
| Max said on August 19, 2016 04:18:16; | |
| Hi Stu, I am building my own pinball but need the electronics to make the thing work, will you be selling yours boards in the near future, would they be easy to program, or would you be interested in helping me write the code | |
| Stu said on September 29, 2016 21:45:08; | |
| Hi Max, I'm lazy, I dont know when they will be up for sale. The design has shifted somewhat, the 'master' board has been reduced to just a switch matrix and I'm now using the raspberry pi3 to do all the game code, which should make programming much much easier. | |
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