dale
Handy tip i found was when i placed my Digikey order I added to the customer notes each location the part was for i.e R1,R2 for resistors and C1,C2 for capacitors as DigiKey marks each ziplock bag with this detail, this made it so much quicker to solder everything onto the PCB.
I found soldering in this order the best U1, 40pin screen connector, U2, U3, T1, T2, D1, C8 then the rest of the small caps and res.
With the keyboard i found going from right to left starting with the power button as i'm left handed this worked well, it is also possible to just solder 3 legs on the buttons if you find it hard to get the leg that is between the legs of the button to the right.
Once i had the board complete i tried to load the 1.04 hex file but i found that without batteries installed it would not find the pic32 so it is important to note that batteries are required to load the firmware.
Moving forward i would like to swap the flash chip with the one from the Supercon badge which i have had delivered from ebay yesterday as seem in one of my pictures.
I am very happy with the result of my project and look forward to many hours of basic programming.
Fabrizio
Benchoff
Jim Heaney
Steph
If you weren't able to get the PCB from eBay, are the files available to have one made? I have a badge, but this is so awesome, and it's got me thinking about other things that could be changed along the way. The BOM isn't expensive, I think this would be a lot of fun to try!