Beta-Portable Wired/Wireless DMX Tester (See first post for specs and features)

[egenoup]

N1ist,

Are the Gerber274 files available?  what is the size of the board?  I would send of and get a few prototype boards made.

Thanks,

Charles S.

[Jeffl]

What does a prototype of a board like this cost?  I'm guessing there is a minimum number that you have to order.

[egenoup]

nope I can get just one, or as many as I would like, but it gets expensive.  if you want more than 10, then a board house would be best.

[kylec]

 <pop..

[n1ist]

It's 2.5" x 3".  I'll get gerbers up tomorrow; I want to do a quick review to make sure I didn't miss anything first.  At BatchPCB, that will come to $18.75 for one.  In quantity, you can get 26 boards for $89 from pcbgeek.  It would drop a bit for 50 from pcbcart, but their real savings comes in at larger quantities.
/mike

[dlhoppe]

Here's a quick first pass at the board.  At Dave's suggestion, I ended up putting all of the components other than the switches and display on the back side of the board, and had to stand the resistors on end for them to fit.  There are still a few tweaks I would like to do for cleanup, and am open to any suggestions.
/mike

Mike, This is awesome! It's coming along nicely. Thanks for your work on this. I'm really getting excited about how quickly this is moving along.

Some things to think about as you already mentioned in your PM. What do we do about a battery pack? Making this portable would be fantastic and is what I had in mind all along. Being able to stroll around outside with it in hand and either plugging a short cat-5 into the controllers or interfacing in wireless mode would be really nice. How about we consider some rechargables in the box with a charge jack? That would alleviate your concerns about having to open the box to change batteries on occasion (given the plastic screw holes). Power consumption is good. As a wired device, it's only pulling about 70ma. With the alkaline AAA's, that's good for around 14 hours of "on time". With wireless, it will consume somewhere around 200ma. Maybe five hours of "on time" with AAA's. So rechargables might be a nice option.

[dlhoppe]

I believe I have everything just about finished on the software side. I'm sure we'll find a glitch or two, but I've been hitting it pretty hard with testing and it's been pretty well bullet-proof. I got as much out of the debounce as I'm going to get. Given the priority I have to give to the DMX, it just can't keep up with ultra-fast encoder spinning. when you spin really fast, it just doesn't respond as well. It does not skip values though. Although it's still pretty quick. The x10 and wrap-around logic is done. Other than adding more whistles and bells, I think it's stable enough to share the hex file whenever you guys want it.

One of the features I like about this tester is that you can put it in channel select mode and turn the encoder back and forth. It will chase through the adjacent channels. So if you had say a mega tree or some arches where the lights are organized in adjacent channels, you can simulate spinning the mega tree of chasing through your arches. Pretty cool. I got some ooohs an ahhhs when Cindi walked in while I was testing. She can't wait til next year's holiday season.  


Dave

[egenoup]

This is great news!  I can't wait for my parts to arrive, so I can breadboard this and test it out. 

Thanks

Charles S.

[RJ]

Guys,

 I hate to be the rain cloud but this is starting to sound like a unapproved coop. I am exicted to see this come to be to but we can not get carried away and start ordering large numbers of pcb people without following the rules. If someone wants to order a prototype or two is one thing but 50 for others is the same as a coop.

You can do it, but you need a approved coop manager to run it.

RJ

[n1ist]

This project still has a ways to go before even thinking of a coop.  I just posted board pricing to give people the idea of what boards cost (in general) for prototype quantities.  At this point, this project is still in the design phase, and I wouldn't expect anyone to order boards other than me, Dave, and Charles to verify the design.  For everyone else, enjoy the popcorn.

 <pop..


/mike

[gforman]

I am just enjoying the progress and the ability the this DLA group has to pull together to make something that we can all benefit from.  Thanks again

Glen  <pop..

[Jeffl]

Sorry.  I was asking the price of a prototype board because I would like to know how people get prototypes made.   I'm just eager to learn.

[dlhoppe]

This project still has a ways to go before even thinking of a coop.  I just posted board pricing to give people the idea of what boards cost (in general) for prototype quantities.  At this point, this project is still in the design phase, and I wouldn't expect anyone to order boards other than me, Dave, and Charles to verify the design.  For everyone else, enjoy the popcorn.

 <pop..


/mike

Agreed. I had no intentions of starting a coop. Lots of work to be done before we hand it over to the coop managers. I suspect there might be a PCB revision or two along the way as well. So this thing is definitely not ready for prime-time yet.

RJ, thanks for chiming in. I think people are just anxious to get their hands on one.

[egenoup]

RJ,

Sorry if I made it sound like we were planning or trying to do a COOP.  This is not the case.  My intention was to get the board dimensions to see how many prototype boards I wanted to foot for us to test.  At 20 bucks a pop and 3 to 4 weeks lead, I might do two or three out of my pocket and provide them to n1ist and dlhoppe.

Once again, sorry.
 
Thanks,

Charles S.

[RJ]

It is no problem and the forum staff will work with everyone when you are ready I just did not want to dissappoint people farther down the line. I am as excited for it to happen as anyone and we will get a coop manager if need for it. We have had a number of members step forward recently so even if none of you can, it will happen we just have to do it proper. No need to be sorry no one did anything just making sure everyone understands.

RJ