by Erin RobotGrrl | Feb 10, 2020 | News, Progress Logs
One of the tasks on the giant todo list was to fix the Super Bright Lights board. One of its traces is touching a pad, which is an error. It should be a quick thing to fix.
These boards were made in a program called pcb, a part of a suite of tools known as gEDA. It is not a very well known electronics design tool. There is a new fork of pcb called pcb-rnd. There are a few slight changes. Installing pcb-rnd on Mac is straight forward. Installing the other tools in gEDA is not. Specifically, we were looking to install gschem, the schematic editor. We tried brew, fink, but nothing was really working (broken dependencies).
Opening the board in gerbv, we can spot that the error does exist in the file, too. (That’s good news)
After some time re-orientating and remembering how to use pcb, here is the fix in pcb-rnd:
Then flip the board just to check nothing else moved:
Hey wait a second, there are question marks all over the board! The reference designators are all wiped out. Maybe something happened with the netlist, or some sort of properties file. We couldn’t figure out or remember how to edit the refdes in the new pcb-rnd. We can’t exactly send this board out knowing that there will be question marks printed all over it…
Here’s the errors that were given, justifying the new question marks on the board:
Anyway, we have an old version of pcb on one of our older computers, and we can make the fix using that. However, going forward, it will be wise if we switch from gEDA to Eagle or KiCAD, since the support for gEDA is very minimal at this point in time.
by Erin RobotGrrl | Feb 7, 2020 | News, Progress Logs
We made the edits that Beck and Brenda found when beta testing, and updated the google sheets. The next step will be to run the python script and update the pages. See their progress log here
by Erin RobotGrrl | Feb 5, 2020 | News, Progress Logs
A little progress log on this, the Bowie brain kit splash page has been updated. It now contains the words giving an overview of the kit, and the big green button to launch into the instructions. There needs to be more work done on the page, it’s a bit of a mix right now, but it has at least been started. Next update will have more photos. You can see it here!
by Erin RobotGrrl | Jan 19, 2020 | News, Progress Logs
By coincidence, was reminded that the brain kit instructions need updating. This was the first kit that we worked on and realised that we are definitely going to need to write a script to help automate some of this. Their google sheet needed a few tweaks to have it compliant with the python script to generate the html of the instruction pages. Today, these tweaks were made, and the generator ran smoothly. The brain kit instruction pages are now updated. Check it out here: bowie brain kit and press the big green GO button.
As mentioned in the previous kit log, the next kit log will be about some of the other todo items like organising the bill of materials for a few of the kits.
by Erin RobotGrrl | Jan 18, 2020 | News, Progress Logs
Huzzah! The other two kits join the party. Check out the steps here: operator interface and wheel kit. Press the big green button on those pages that says GO.
Wow, that was sure a lot of work to reach this point. This is exciting though, because now we — everyone — can see some of the steps to make their own Bowie. It’s getting closer, a tiny bit closer, to our vision of having a repository of environmental tools add-ons for Bowie, and having many people all around the world contributing to it, and running their own Field Tests. Maybe this is getting a little ahead of ourselves, since there’s still plenty more work to do. But at least we’re a lot closer than 38 kit logs ago!
Now, all the 5 kits are at step 8. Here’s the list again since it was a while ago since this was posted:
Steps in the documentation process:
1) Lists of the components for bill of materials and packing list
2) Photos of step-by-step assembly process
3) Photo editing of the photos
4) Written description of each step
5) Editing review
6) Formatting for website
7) Publish it
8) Making sure files and code are up and work
9) Add the kits to our online store
10) Ship it
Getting the files and code organised and posted is now the current step. There are also additional notes, for example, for some of the kits, they need their pricing finalised in the bill of materials.
Once all of these are done, or perhaps before, are the assembly instructions for the 3D printed pieces.
The work continues!
