I got another shipment of electronic components from Digikey.ca the other day.
Their ordering interface is crap. I spent many frustrating hours setting up order lists only to be confronted with the inability to combine them. Searching for parts is difficult, and all in all just a bad experience. But, they have a deal with Canada Customs, and shipping (including any customs charges) is $8 for UPS. I usually get the parts in 2 days. That is why I continue to use them.
Conversely, Mouser has an awesome UI. Save projects, share them, searching is quick and easy… it’s all very easy and almost fun to use. BUT the big downside is that the shipping is slower, and they don’t have a deal with customs, so the last order I had to pay $20 COD for those costs on top of their shipping charge (which was also only about $8 but for slower USPS)
Now that I’m familiar with Digikey’s new BOM manager, it’s major limitations, and how to work around them, it will be easier to reorder more parts as required. I’ll keep using Digikey because of the order fulfilment side of the process. I just hope they ’2.0′ their site some day soon.
With this last shipment, I have all the parts to build the remaining SSRs and the Ren-C for my display. Those links go to ChristmasInShirley’s wiki for all things automated display… it’s the best site I’ve found… tons of maintained info. So now I just need to wait for the remaining boards to arrive, and I’ll be able to finish up the electronics side of things.
The Ren-C is a board that allows my Grinch controller to work over the serial port rather than the parallel port, and adds dimming capabilities. It’s run by a PICMicro chip that needs to be programmed. It’s all out there (source files, howtos, etc) but I need to have the hardware and software to program the PIC chip.
Luckily, I was into PIC programming before… I used the PIC16F84s for a few things, so I am familiar with what needs to happen for programming the chips. Unfortunately, that was many years ago and my memory, and chip programmer did not stand the test of time. So, off to Microchip’s site to grab MPLap, and then find WinPic to program the chips, and I needed to build a new programmer.
This would have been quite a daunting task but since I’ve got all the equipment it’s relatively easy to build a board. I’m no electrical engineer, but there are a lot of schematics for simple PIC programmers out there… I found PICPROGv5 by illumicon. Unfortunately, he’s out of stock, and not building any more or I would have just ordered the board… so I used his schematic and parts list to design my own board.
I grabbed ExpressPCB and started building a design… a few hours later, I had a workable single sided solution… I’m sure the EEs out there will point out many problems with it, but I’ve built it and it works… Here’s the pcb file (myPicProg5v2) but be warned, that I have only tested it once, and not sure that’s it’s 100% right… also, it’s built off the PICPROGv5… so it’s their hard work that went into my crappy ‘redesign’. Note: the top layer traces are just jumpers… it’s a single sided board. Also, not all the values are correct/entered, so take a look at the original PICPROG site for the schematic and component values. Component IDs are the same.
So after building the board, I went for the tried and true toner transfer method of getting the design on the board… In a nutshell, you print the traces using a laser printer on a glossy magazine cover(the toner doesn’t stick to glossy as well and transfers better than if you used regular paper), then place that on a very clean copper clad board, iron it down then soak in water and peel away the paper. I had good luck with very thin paper rather than super glossy paper… pages from my Mouser catalogue work great 
If you want more detail, there is a myriad of sites out there that have full instructions… check YouTube as well.
Since coper oxidizes quite rapidly, I decided to spray paint the bottom of the board to protect it… lol.
So the programmer is built and tested with a simple flashing LED program for the old 16F84s I had laying around. Haven’t tried it on the PIC I’ll be using for the Ren-C… Perhaps this weekend I’ll try to bang something together. Now it’s just waiting on the boards to finish this all up. I’ve got plenty of work to do around the house to keep me busy, oh… and a bunch of mini and mid trees to build
