Beacon

Beacon Devlog #8

Anyone with skill in Fusion, would appreciate help!

Quick one today after a break yesterday: got to work learning Fusion to design a shell. After I discovered Control Point Spline and the Mirror tool, the front came together quite quickly.

I’ve made a 3D model of my main PCB, and found a 3D model for a display case, which I’ll try to work into the design’s base.

If anyone has any resources for creating 3D printable buttons that I could take a look at, it’d be much appreciated.

Additionally, as in the screenshot, I can’t seem to bevel this edge (or the opposite edge) with the Fillet tool. Changing the distance does nothing, and neither does changing the corner type or tangency weight. Would love any advice!

Beacon Devlog #7: PRIMARY PCB COMPLETE!

This one took about 20 hours, so I’ll go over the primary setbacks here:

• initial schematic didn’t really consider high threshold voltage of warm white LEDs - trying to power them off of the primary 3.3v rail would result in manufacturing differences just killing some of them most likely. I instead connected the MOSFETs which power the breakouts directly to the battery regulator voltage, which should hover closer to 4V.
• A couple of my components (e.g. a 3.3v i2s MEMS microphone) had faulty footprints when downloaded through vendors like DigiKey, which took me embarrassingly long to work out
• My last post shows a comical amount of errors: these stem from many of my footprints for smaller components (e.g. TVS diode array) having small pads with low distances between each other. I downloaded custom design rules for JLCPCB without really understanding what they did, and had to shuffle with them a bit to get round the 300 warnings (down to about 9 now, I think they’re safe to ignore)
• Finding suitable headers for the breakout boards (the 2 8-pins at the top) took a while, given how little room I’m working with. Every connector on the board posed a major routing challenge until I realised that I could change my schematic in response to a dead end on the PCB. On a related note, I’m mixing and matching connectors here to fit the few components I already own (e.g. standard 2.54mm headers for my E-Ink)
• Working out differential pairs was less than fun
• About 4 hours of work didn’t record while I was working out how to use an old spare monitor with my laptop: not the end of the world, but a shame

This is my first project with KiCad: the resolution’s not great, but if you spot any issues please mention them

What’s Next

Before I apply for funding, I need to make a 3D model of the enclosure, design the LED breakout boards, and make a proper GitHub repo out of these.

I hope to have that done in the next 5 days or so, so I can focus more on school when it starts up again.

When it’s done, hope you guys give it a try!

might be cooked

see you guys in 10 hours

Beacon Devlog #6

PCB neeeeearly finished: you can see how much space I gave myself that I didn’t end up needing
I think if I were to restart now I could tidy it up a bit more: with me not having done this before I underestimated just how much I need to clean up the rats nets first, and have ended up compensating with soooooooo many vias
Also need to finalise connector types: mixing and matching for the minute because my AliExpress e-ink uses the nichest connector known to man

Beacon Devlog #5

just discovered how to get more than one line in here, thanks gang

Main board schematic complete!
Since the last update, I’ve added an on/off switch to the battery
controller, made use of all available IO and finalised the links to the
LED breakouts (need to design later, should be simple in comparison)
shift register’s doing some heavy liftingg

Also spent far too long getting the 3d models and footprints for every
part, so working on PCB should be seamless tomorrow.

anyone with PCB design experience, would greatly appreciate if you gave this a quick check, as it’s my first time working on a circuit. beacon devlog #4: aside from some peripheral buttons (maybe a potentiometer) and the shift register/output LEDs, schematic is complete!

Devlog 3: if anyone knows how to put line breaks in these dev logs pleeeease let me know - started work on the enclosure model, and began working out the logic of the whole circuit: attached is a simulated circuit which should(!) let me control about 40 LEDs with just 3 ESP32 GPIO pins

ticker devlog 2: got a little distracted from the whole metronome thing when my e-ink display came in the mail - developed an algorithm that draws a random constellation to use as a startup/sleep screen. might implement some different shapes of stars later: only wrote code to handle truncated regular polygons. if I stick to any kind of plan, next up should be learning CAD or KiCAD!

First dev post on Ticker (name needs work): a metronome which counts along to your beat. About half of my logged time has been spent on a rough design, with the other half being research. The plan is to have the device analyse the signal from an internal microphone to detect beats and determine BPM, and so I’m learning how to implement FFT in C++ (and how to use C++ in general!). Below is today’s design work; my initial idea was to mimic analog/pendulum metronomes with a motor, but I couldn’t think of a clean way to implement it. White strips on front will instead light up in time (having 7 allows us to represent compound times, although may be confusing for harder polyrhythms)