Tuesday, December 9, 2008

The Octinct "Controller" is Born

Devon was in the same boat I was, wanting a controller to replace the spaghetti mess of a breadboard that the Octinct required. For his 2nd pcb he did a very good job of creating an arduino shield that would connect all of the buttonpads together ... but had one small problem. Remember those expensize specialized idc connectors required to breadboard an Octinct, well the pinout on the socket side is different than a standard idc cable. This resulted in shield pcb's that would have to be rewired by hand, a daunting task of 96 wires.

Meanwhile Devon had his own reduction in free time with new employment, so I figured I would give a crack at it.

My having more spare time rather than better technical expertise resulted in the creation of a functionally correct Ocinct contoller shield, one version without a ground plane and limited to about 500ma, the other with heavy traces and a ground plane that would be able to handle 1.2amps or higher. The idea was that if the board had to be reworked it would be easier to troubleshoot on the 'light' shield. You can see the result in my flickr feed.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

nice work! Is this going to be available at curiousinventor in the near future?

I just received my button controller pcbs from them and will be using them with the seeedstudio button pads. I really want to make an rgb version though.