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New Boards, Changes & Testers

A project log for Thunder Pack

A kick-ass high-power ARM board with everything you need -- and small enough to fit in your pocket.

jeremyJeremy 10/04/2019 at 13:355 Comments

The boards have arrived! I haven't assembled any yet, but everything is feeling a lot more polished.

Beta Testers

Now that the boards are close to completion, I've reached out to some friends and asked them to give them a spin and put them through their paces. I'm excited to get their feedback.

If you're interested to be a beta tester, let me know and I'll help you get setup.

Now 100% more dongle & sewable 

The new batch has a hole at the end so it can be hung from a carabiner and notches if it will be sewn to something. The dongle hole can be removes from the board with a pair of diagonal cutters, if it's unnecessary. 

Debug Changes + More GPIO

When I moved from 4 layers to 2 layers, space got tight and I had to move the JTAG/SWD pins to the bottom of the board, under the switch (assuming you'd have the switch on top and the debug headers on the bottom). At the time I thought this was a clever way to save some space and keep the layout tidy.

While waiting for the new round of boards, I've been working on writing a decent WS2812B addressable LED example and have been using the debugging interface quite a lot. It's become clear that having the debug pins on the bottom means you cannot debug AND be on a breadboard; which is inconvenient. 

So last night I rerouted things.

Now, instead of a dedicated JTAG/SWD block, the necessary 3 pins (reset, PA13, PA4) have been added to the GPIO rows. The happy side-effect is now the board has 2 additional GPIO pins to use!

Next Round of Boards...

I'm controlling my twitchy finger from ordering a new batch of boards with the latest routing. First, I want to build a couple boards from this batch, run them through some tests and get the WS2812B example working.

Discussions

pundittech wrote 03/11/2020 at 09:01 point

Yes would love to sir! :)

  Are you sure? yes | no

pundittech wrote 02/16/2020 at 02:51 point

Hey mate,

Sorry for the late reply. I am situated in Aus, so yes if you could get it to me, more than happy to do the testing for you :)

  Are you sure? yes | no

Jeremy wrote 02/17/2020 at 19:39 point

Awesome. I'm working out a couple kinks in the latest design and will let you know. Thanks!

  Are you sure? yes | no

pundittech wrote 10/14/2019 at 06:01 point

Would love to be part of beta testing and volunteering. :)

  Are you sure? yes | no

Jeremy wrote 02/08/2020 at 21:08 point

Hi Pundittech, sorry I didn't see this comment until now. Are you still interested in beta testing? 

  Are you sure? yes | no