Boards are In!
The boards finally came in the mail! They actually have our names written on them XD. I cut them up and David is putting on the voltage regulator right now because he's much better at soldering. I'll do some of the easier stuff like beacons later on so that I don't mess up anything important.
Artwork
Dave is back today. He's been sick the whole week. We started placing the components ont the artwork and deciding how we want to lay it all out. Hopefully in a couple days, we'll be ready to order the board.
Board Mechanical Artwork
I did the board layout today and got the screw hole locations measured and added them to the artwork. It's harder than you think....
Footprints anyone?
We haven't made a blog entry in a while already. However, there isn't really much to report. We've been working on the schematic mostly and it's proving to be a bigger pain than we anticipated. We have to find/make and add a footprint to every single component individually. It's very time consuming and the software we're using is pretty buggy so it can get a little frustrating at times. But we're almost done so it's all good.
Too Much Wasted Time
Today we tried to go from the number of bits to our actual binary message. To simplify things we coded in visual c++ rather than MP Labs. It took a while but we got the number of bits translated into binary by storing the binary message in another array. After we got that right we tried to do the same thing by bit shifting within one variable (to save memory) rather than using arrays. In the end we got that method mostly working but we decide to stick with the arrays because we didn't have any problems with it and we aren't worried about memory space. Tomorrow we will try and implement that into our code.
