Looking to pay someone to create a large part

Good point @vanepp, I put all of the ‘driving’ circuitry on the underside of the PCB such as the 555 timer, current limiting and pull down resistors, transistors for the seven segment display and darlington array for the LED matrix. They are all surface mount components and by having them under the board, it makes the top less confusing.

Good, you had already thought of that :slight_smile: . I think I’ll leave them out of schematic view as well to not add confusion there either.

Good idea :slight_smile:

Are the rgb leds common cathode or common anode? Since the one in Fritz is common cathode I’ll assume that for the moment and change it if necessary. Same for the leds in the pushbuttons common cathode or common anode (this only matters in schematic)

The RGB LED’s are common Cathode and the push buttons are also.

Have a look at About the parts submit category
You can see more details for similar work at http://evive.cc

One more question: On the Arduino outputs there is A4 and A5 and a separate SCL (which should also be A4?) and SDA(which should also be A5?). I’m assuming the pins are bussed together internally (as with the power wires) or am I missing something?

Thats right, the current version of the Arduino Uno has the seperate SCL and SDA pins as well as the A4 and A5 pins so I thought i’d also have these connections as well even though they are in fact connected together. I.E. A4 = SDA and A5 = SCL.

Here’s the Arduino Uno R3 Schematic:
https://www.arduino.cc/en/uploads/Main/Arduino_Uno_Rev3-schematic.pdf

I’m almost done :slight_smile: Schematic got finished yesterday and the fpz file for connectors is done, but I just ran in to an issue with connector terminals in schematic that are miss placed and won’t move (probably why they are miss placed :slight_smile: ) so I need to fix that (probably by replacing the polygon with a rectangle) and then I should be ready to upload an update.

That is fantastic :slight_smile:

Really appreciated all the hard work you’ve been putting into this and certainly look forward to seeing your completed part however there is no rush, I’m just thankful someone has been able to figure it out!

Its good there is no rush, because I just tried a test version and Frtizing is unhappy about most connections (or possibly just a few) and there looks to be a font issue betwen Inkscape and Fritzing as the fonts are misplaced in Fritzing (likely to be translate problems I think) so I’m somewhat further than I hoped from a review copy :slight_smile: (but I’m having fun and learning!)

You can change the text to paths, and that gets around all the mucking around text/font problems. No one is ever going to change the text in the future so it’s not going to be a problem.

While it may come to that, I’d prefer not to. It makes the part less reusable.

If it was a common part, ie TO-220, where you might have to mod it to another part, yes it’s better with the text/font. But because this will never have to be changed, it would probably be better with the trace to path.

Brad: a suggestion (perhaps way too late :slight_smile: ) on a layout improvement. While testing the part (which looks to now at least be entirely working) I ran across an issue where it is hard to get the wires placed in breadboard (and to some extent in real life as well) on the rgb led connectors. I think the layout change below would improve usability a lot! May or may not be practical to do at this point though. The middle row (the green leds) gets covered by connections to the red and blue making it difficult to change (not impossible, just more difficult than it needs to be).

I was actually going to have that sort of layout originally but then decided against it. But now having played with my prototype and having heard your feedback, I think it would most probably be best to change it to your suggested layout. I could certainly imagine it would be very annoying trying to connect wires using fritzing when the connections are bunched so close together.

Despite the long silence there is in fact progress this project :slight_smile: below is the current Fritzing part of this project. It turns out it can’t be a single part (at least not if we want schematic to work at all well) as the subparts code gets very slow with 12 large subparts and won’t coexist with busses (which this needs). Luckily @steelgoose suggested making the breadboard the base part with static images, then locking it and overlaying and locking the other 12 subsystems as individual parts (making them movable in schematic without being subparts) which seems to work. Please have a poke at this and point out any errors or problems you see (I’m sure there are some still :slight_smile: ). PCB view is mostly non existent (and not needed) but breadboard and schematic should both work ok.

Peter

bradsprojects_education_board_1_alpha5.fzz (543.6 KB)

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@vanepp, we’ve finally finished moving house and have now had a good chance to sit down and play with your design.

Everything seems to work really well except I can’t get the breadboard to work at all. That is, it does not detect that any connections have been made - i’ve tried this on both Mac os and Windows 7. Is this working for you?

Yep doesn’t work for me either (and not something I thought to test!). I’ll have a look!

Peter

Turned out to be the lack of a keyword to enable the breadboard magic :slight_smile: this one will hopefully be better.

bradsprojects_education_board_1_alpha6.fzz (543.3 KB)

Peter

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