We’ve been getting back to a more regular schedule with the weeknotes and like an 80’s schoolkid in a snorkle parka, playing keepie uppie on the playground at breaktime, I’m determined not to be the one that drops the ball. So just the one week of weeknotes from Chris this week. I’m not using vim but I’ll do my best to be no less vigorous. (As Adrian mentioned last week Neil isnt here now to stop my nonsense.)

After the initial success checking over the new Hexanoodle prototypes, Adrian has found getting code onto them trickier. It’s a chip we haven’t used before, so there’s been both a new toolchain to pick up and new getting-code-onto-the-chip processes to master.

The toolchain and code side (for an initial program, at least) didn’t prove too troublesome; but so far it has resolutely resisted any attempts to get the code onto the chip. This week the oscilloscope will be brought to bear on it, to see if that sheds any light on the situation.

The oscilloscope was also out to help debug the final repair needed for the JoyRide My Bike’s Got LED boxes. That let us track down where a pad on the board had come away from the PCB, which was preventing a crucial clock signal get to the audio board. That’s now fixed and we need to get the boxes back onto the “disco bikes”.

A black background with three green and three red circles on it. It looks like a Christmas card design from the 1980s that time has quite correctly forgotten. It's actually the subtle changes needed to the positions of thre 0.6 mm varicaps on the Museum in a Box NFC reader. We're starting the process of making the next batch.

In manufacturing news, after some final checks to the production files—making sure the dots to show the orientation of the tiny (0.6mm by 0.6mm!) variable capacitors were in the right place, as that bug caused no end of trouble on the last batch—the next batch of Museum in a Box circuit boards were ordered from our contract manufacturer in Glasgow.

A screenshot from Freecad showing the Sheet Metal workbench being used to create the design for packaging for My Bikes got LED. The design is for a cardboard insert that can accomodate the circuit board, battery and lights.

And there was a bit of time left on #FreeCADFriday to start drawing up the design for the packaging for the My Bike’s Got LED kits

Along with the Hexanoodle boards we recieved last week were some of the new design My Bike’s got LED boards. All the core components are the same as in the previous version but we made sufficient changes to the layout of the gpio interface to need a new OSHWA accreditation. We were pleased to receive this in Open Source Hardware month, along with the confirmation for Lightbeam accreditation.

The layout change was primarily to incorporate a footprint for the easily available INMP441 microphone breakout boards. The same pins are available on both revisions of the board but the new version allows for the microphone to be connected easily. As with any time a new batch of boards arrived it wasn’t possible to resist testing them for long. As you can see from the video above the setup works well with our build of WLED and the microphone seems very responsive. The next step is to get it fixed to a board and out on the streets.