Since my last post which was me drawing my schematic for a PCB to be printed, I have followed the advice of a few people over at the netduino forums (mainly mario and mark) and have nearly finished making a protoboard. I am getting on quite well, the schematic has changed a little here and there and I'm sure during testing and programming of my protoboard there will be even more changes and additions to come.
So far I have done the vast majority of soldering on my protoboard, I started with the layout, which I must say doesn't entirely represent my PCB layout, but I guess this is to test the circuit works as expected. I've got the RTC, the 595s and 165s completely soldered up and as you can see in the picture below, I have tested the shift registers and they are working perfectly!
I am really pleased with this, nothing has set on fire, gone bang or more disappointingly... done nothing! So this is a good start.
Next I am going to test that the RTC works and then I will be able to test the netduino pluged straight in to my protoboard without wire connecting specific things up. Once that is working I will finish off the LCD connection soldering and 4052 serial mux so I can select the LCD as a device. This will be the first time I have used the 4052 so it will be an interesting test, fingers crossed all will be well.
The osscilator for the tlc5940s is barely on the board yet, I have litterally just placed the chip holders, soldered some headers for the pwm outs and attached the power and grounds. I could really do with testing this on some breadboard first as I am still a little unsure as to how the osscilator needs connecting up.
Hopefully in my next post I should have a working clock, LCD and a soldered up osscilator!
P.S. Here is a top and bottom view of the board
