So I’ve ordered a plethora of stuff lately. Yesterday the 5×7 magnifier came. I’m figuring out I have no place to work on this stuff properly so it’s sort of wedged on my desk, and then today a box from Mouser showed up. In it I’ve determined I purchased the wrong AC adapter…. so now I need to order another one but this is for a slightly later stage so it can wait a little. Plus I believe I have a power supply I used on a fan to keep the air moving in my indoor orchid tray and lights area that is not being used currently due to a different setup that I’ve already stripped the ends off that I could then use with the relay board I received from Bulgaria. I’ll probably find something else to use that power supply for later anyway.<\/p>\n
Anyway, TODAY the Mouser box arrived. In it were a variety of 0603 sized capacitors. For those that don’t know what that means… they are .06 inches by .03 inches or approximately 1.5mm by .77mm give or take a few hundredths of a milimeter.<\/p>\n
Today I learned that fluxes are awesome when soldering SMT devices. I managed to mount my 32.768 6pF crystal and some of the 11pF 0603 capacitors from the selection but it was an adventure. I’ve lost approximately 4-5 of them into the rug somewhere now. Two are now securely attached to the board. I got the first one out ok but lost the second one immediately. I got a third one out but it didnt make it to the table and went straight for the rug. I recovered one of them from the rug and then tried to get it soldered onto the board. Two of them blew away using the hot air system. Once I got a corner tacked down properly it went much smoother. After allowing things to cool off I mounted the USB II Microchip board back into the IO board and connected to my LCD and fired it up. Immediately the clock on the display started ticking off seconds. <\/p>\n
I had quite a bit of difficulty getting the soldering stuff going. I looked up temperatures for things on Wikipedia and ended up grossly under heating things up. I ended up looking up the soldering station’s manual on the internet since I couldn’t actually find it right now due to the bags and bags and boxes of parts and shipping materials everywhere. Once I finished looking that over things melted much more easily and started acting more normally. Once I started packing the parts away into boxes I discovered the real manual buried in the pile.<\/p>\n
As mentioned the timer is running just fine. I am waiting a few hours to see how far off the time is from my computer to get an idea of whether this has a slight or a significant drift. So far it looks quite good. Time will have to tell. ULTIMATELY being REASONABLY close over a few minutes is fine. In the final project I will be using a DS3232 I think it is as a time source to populate the microchip “RTCC” after powering the system down and then turning it back on. Microchip for whatever reason built a system that has marketing towards it having a Real Time Clock built in. The problem is it doesn’t keep time when you turn it off due to having no backup battery of any kind. As a result it needs to be set every time you apply power to the system and then take it away when you turn it off. <\/p>\n
Since I intend to hook this to the internet \/ router eventually I will try to implement a NTP client to set time into the DS3232 and then from there into the Microchip PIC32 while it runs. I’ve now manually adjusted the clock to be in sync (visibly anyway) with an atomic clock synced clock I have here immediately next to it. I set it at 10:12 so I will check it again in a few hours. The longer it seems stable the less I’ll have to make it lookup from the Dallas chip….. <\/p>\n
I believe tomorrow I will be getting some ambient temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure sensors as well as a few other sensors I may or may not be experimenting around with too in this and other projects. So far 10 minutes in the clocks still seem synced so we’ll see what happens over the next few hours and overnight.<\/p>\n
Oh… and Microchip never replied to my “technical support” request to get an idea what they suggested. I think the details I’ve found on the internet meant several different options of crystal and capacitor combo were ok and what they DESIGNED it with was not very common to find. I managed to find what it sounded like it was designed for though and so far so good.<\/p>\n
I should start mounting the header pins this weekend and start hooking things to some of the external sensors to start getting readings into the programming. Once that happens I can start porting my PIC24 code over making a few adjustments and then start programming the roast curve tracking portion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So I’ve ordered a plethora of stuff lately. Yesterday the 5×7 magnifier came. I’m figuring out I have no place to work on this stuff properly so it’s sort of wedged on my desk, and then today a box from Mouser showed up. In it I’ve determined I purchased the wrong AC adapter…. so now I need to order another one but this is for a slightly later stage so it can wait a little. Plus I believe I have a power supply I used on a fan to keep the air moving in my indoor orchid tray and lights \u2026 Continue reading