The RGB dash project

[Roku_trueno]

Wow! I haven't seen that project and now I'm stunned (opposed to you I have very limited electrical knowledge...)! Great idea, eager to see how this turns out!

[Vaptor]

Looks really good, just like a pro would make it, looking forward to see the final result

[robokill]

quality looks good ivan. This is sort of a master project itself. When do you plan to build and finish the first

[banpei]

My jaw dropped to the floor! Stunning!

[Ivan141]

I'm starting assembly for the first one soon.
The trouble is that I've included a rather difficult to hand solder (if you wouldn't say that for the entire board already ) 16MHz ceramic resonator.

[edit] just got it soldered in[/edit]

If I screw those little things up I can always resort to using the onboard 8MHz oscillators.

I should really get myself the right tools for this job (snack oven and solder paste so I can solder one side all at once, and a hot air rework station + some better suited soldering tips for hand soldering work).

No on to the business of figure sawing the various boards out of the first main board.

[Ivan141]

Bugger it, found my first mistake.
The layout I used for the needle LED's is the mirror image of the actual led's.
Dont know how this happened, but it sucks big time. Luckily these led's are only used for the needles because they are really tiny for rgb led's.
This means my first 12 needle light boards are basically scrap, but I will be salvaging some with a bit of crafty cutting and rewiring. Need to make sure it works before getting anything new made. I could get a couple to work with almost no modifications if I sacrifice the blue led pin, but maybe I'll come up with something better to make the best of these first prototypes.

[Ivan141]

Last update without some fresh pictures (I hope):

I soldered the 2 main boards 99%. Only the serial-to-USB chip left on the todo list, along with some of the little auxiliary gauge backlights.
I tested everything in a couple of phases, first the switching power supply (which is absolutely rock solid, oh joy!), and today 99% assembled.
I can get the speedo backlights to light up like a christmas tree in all 3 colors, next thing to do is to burn some bootloader code into the MCU so I can test the pixel-addressable lights (tach side).

[BOOMEX]

I nearly understand nothing.

but it's cool

[Ivan141]

Well, the microcontroller chip (the processor, MCU for short) runs the software for the board. It has serial communication (RS232) on board, but that's a bit old fashioned so I put a USB converter chip in there to make it easier to connect to a pc.

In order to be able to easily load new programs into the MCU it needs a bootloader application, which allows me to load software over the USB port.

[BOOMEX]

Thanks