Time Drags

Things seem to have slowed down a little as we come to the end of our PCB design. (See previous post for a break down). There are a few little niggly things that need to be sorted and then hopefully all will be ready for manufacture. We are having a couple of issues with the footprints as some need to be manually designed on the computer and this means we have to find the supporting documentation that will allow us to get it right. But as I said we are nearly there.

From here we are beginning to look at the software side of things and this is a lot more interesting as far as I am concerned. There are three processors on the mother board and another on the daughterboard that need to be programmed and a lot of the code will be... how to explain?
Lets say you want to play a game of Cluedo. You get out the board, pick who plays which character, sort the cards and pick out the murder pack, shuffle, deal, and finally begin the game. Programming a proccessor is similar in that you have to organise the program before it can begin doing it's thing. There are a lot of ones and zeros which must be used to turn on certain functions and set operating parameters. It can be hard, but only if you don't know what to look for and this side of things comes with experience. The manufacturers supply pretty detailed instructions anyway :-)

So the next chapter in the saga is a move from hardware to software, but the going doesn't get any easier. More later.