Here's the finished product. It turned out pretty good. It would be even better, if we had some trick or treaters. We still haven't even had one yet, and it's after 7 o'clock. Oh well it was a fun project anyway.
Happy Halloween!
The boards work! Well at least the first 3 work. Hopefully I can finish assembling the 5 remaining boards and get this coding done before Halloween. So far I've got a smooth cycle through the colors and a cool lightning effect. Just a bit more work code wise and that part should be good. The deadline is fast approaching though...
Here are pictures of the completed PCB layout and the etched circuit board. I used PCBArtist to create the schematic and board layout for free. Then I just printed the layout on the press'n peel sheets to form the top and bottom layers.
Ironing the prints on to the bare copper board makes the toner from the printer transfer to the copper creating an etch resist.
Then using some Ferric Chloride (nasty stuff) I removed all the excess copper leaving me with the picture on the right.
Next step, cut the boards from the panel and populate them. After all this work I hope my circuit is correct...
In an effort to stay current with everything I learned in school I decided to start a Halloween project. I'm building boards to do some cool lighting effects outside so we can scare the kiddies.
Basically I'm using a serial to parallel constant current led driver to drive 3 high output RGB LED's from Osram. I'll have eight of these boards connected in series all driven by the Luminary micro Arm 7 micro-controller development kit that I got for Christmas.
Since I'm cheap I'm manufacturing the PCB myself using Press'n Peel for the etch resist. It won't be as good as having it manufactured somewhere, but it'll be much cheaper.
Results too follow...
