After much iteration on the firmware for the keyboard, I decided on finally assembling the device, in spite of not being completely finished. It will continue to be a work-in-progress, but I need to move on to other projects for now. Once I finish some other projects, I’ll come back to this one.
Continue reading Assembling the keyboard toy (or: shipping an unfinished product)
Emboldened by my past success with the Roomba revision D boards, I decided to incorporate this new knowledge of reflow into the next revision for the keyboard toy. A few things needed to change with this design. First, I never did find a good way to incorporate the port expander into the final design; so out it went. Second, the wire harness proved much too cumbersome–I would use a simple female header instead for the TFT. Third, to save space, I would use the TQFP-32 package for the ATMega328p. Continue reading Reflow soldering: further experiments and observations
There were a few reasons contributing to the decision to start over completely. The old one had languished, untouched, for so long, that it seemed silly, at this point, to simply write new articles or posts for it. Additionally, I had the idea that it might be nice to form a joint blog where both Bonnie and I could write and share the same space.
While these first two ideas existed, the catalyst for actually doing it was that I now have a shiny new Windows Azure space; and since I have that, I now have an opportunity to save a bit of money by moving all my web-hosted stuff over to it. So, given the various articles and resources that document the process, I decided to try it out.
For the record, there are a few different articles that outline how to accomplish this, but this one seemed the best written of the ones I found: “WordPress on Windows Azure: Single-Site Deployment.” It”s worth a read if it interests you at all. Note that the steps about the “FileSystemDurabilityPlugin” are no longer necessary; it was removed from the scaffolder. That tripped me up for a bit, until I found this section on an article on the AzurePHP website.
Update: For those that might be interested, it doesn”t quite work out of the box. One small tweak is required to get it to work properly.
