I finished my PCB, after adding a bit of protection for the vbus. I now decided that I want to add another pcb for a control unit, to arm the buzzer and check the connection with the individual module.
wow I realized, that im really bad at regularly writing a devlog. So what happened in the five hours since last time. I am nearly finished with the the PCB. But from the beginning… I am using a 4 layer pcb with signal layer, ground layer, 3.3v layer and another signal layer. Aside from this, I think that antennas and these differential pairs for ethernet and usb signal is black magic. It took a lot of time figuring out how to pick all the values and route it correct. I placed nearly all components and just need to fix my power management and fix all of the drc problems. I also decided to remove the extra i2c connector and lipo charging option, because they were a bit of a headache and I decided that it wasn’t worth the hassle
Recap of my schematic experience: Soon after posting my first declog, I realized, that my best bet is to look at the schematic of existing w5500 breakout boards and esp32s. I decided on the one from soldered, and an esp dev board from Adafruit, because both of them published their schematics. (shoutout to them :) ) I had a few mistakes after my first version, which I could resolve by asking AI to analyze my .sch file and tell me about potential problems. After that, I added the specific features, like connectors for an external switch, connectors for external neopixel( Oh… for that I needed a level switcher from 5v to 3.3v). I think my hours seem a bit high, for what I achieved so far, but I think I am progressing slow, but steady, mainly, because I look a lot of components and connections twice, out of fear of messing something up.
Last year we had a gameshow at my school with about 400 people watching. Ive built a buzzer system for it, consisting of 4 esp32 and a raspberry pi as the host. When a buzzer was pressed, it triggered a UDP message in the network for the raspberry pi, that locked all of the other buttons and sent a osc command to the grandma, led wall and triggered a sound effect. Because of the short time window I used a dev board and a w5500 breakout board, so that I could solder all of it easily together. It was on a messy perfboard. Because of that, troubleshooting was really time consuming.I started with looking for schematics for the breakout board, but didn’t find the exact ones, so im using the one from soldered a a guide. I now have the main chip wired up, but still need to do stuff like headers, power management and ethernet connection. After that I want to put an esp chip on there, so that it is all completely on the PCB.
I did my macropad completely. idk, why cicada wasn’t registered by hackatime
