USBPICPROG Hardware Ready..

I finally got the things that I ordered for from the online shop last week. They took nearly 10 days to deliver the product. I have received all the items except there was one drill bit less. Guess they missed out on that. Rest of the things were in proper quantity. I would not mind it so much for in an order of Rs.1300, 10 bugs don’t matter much. But I would surely mind if the components fail.

Last week as I was waiting for the hardware I read through the Zigbee protocol. I have read the PHY and the MAC layer. Some more is left to understand so I will blog about it next time. For now lemme blog about todays activity.

The day started off with a decision to finish and test the hardware. So before getting on to the actual work I decided to check the board ones properly for any disconnected routes and missing drills. I found a few missing drills and completed it. Then I spend the next 5 hrs soldering it. I was doing it very slow because I kept checking the components often for correctness. I did not want to do a mistake and remove a soldered component. Doing so inevitably spoils the board. After meticulously checking for errors I finished soldering. Though one difference I find is in the capacitors. I have put ceramic instead of a type of capacitor that the board design has. I don’t know what type it is. The BOM generated by KiCad calls it Cuni Package but I did not get much information on the Internet. This capacitor has 3 legs. I hope it makes no difference with the replacement.

Now I wanted to test the board and here came the road block. As the usbpicprog runs on a pic I  had to program it first inorder to check the board. So I planned to find a computer with a serial port and use the programmer that I had built earlier for serial ports. And this was more difficult than I thought. I could not find a PC with Serial port. This showed me what obsolescence means in electronics. What was such a common thing earlier isn’t available anymore. Anyways I have some workstations in my lab which have serial port so I will use it tomorrow and check it. I just hope that it doesn’t give me any adventures and it works in one go.

So till then fingers crossed.