It was an absolute pleasure to work on this project. From the beginning to the end it took 12 Friday afternoon labs to design and build. Of course it would not be a learning experience if there were no problems to fix along the way.
The first problem was on the switch board. After the developing process, there were a number of tracks broken and while drilling, the pads came away from the board. Trying to work with this board proved to be too difficult for soldering. Significant time was lost in the lab because a new board needed to be made. When drilling the new board, another piece of PCB board was placed underneath to protect the pads from getting damaged. Doing this meant that the pads where intact and allowing a better connection for soldering.
After soldering all the components and during the testing stages a mistake was found on the switch board. One of the resistor packs was soldered in backwards. This was easily fixed by removing the solder with the suction pump and re-soldering it in place. The next problem appeared while all the boards were mounted onto a Perspex platform and was been interfaced with the software through the Parallel port on the PC. It was only getting 3.8V into the board from a 5V output from the voltage source. After some testing it was discovered that the plastic washer on the positive jack lead was the cause. This was corrected by filing it down by .5 mm to allow a better grip at the back of the board and allowing a second nut so that a proper connection could be made.
Over all the project was a complete success and a lot was learned in the process. The knowledge of Cadstar and Visual Basic from other modules proved to be very useful. This blog was kept and updated each week throughout the semester and that in itself has been a good learning experience.
Thank you for taking interest in my blog.
Oliver Quinn
