Enterprise Navigation Lights Update

The Story so far.....

The boards have arrived! And it was done in less than a week! I had some money which I got from some CCTV business in 2004. I need to close the account anyway, since I am not doing business anymore after I got a 9 to 5. Nothing much but it was enough to pay for the PCBs. And so, after paying the cash, they actually rushed my design to the PCB shop in Shah Alam. How I got my board so quickly was that another customer was in a rush and so, Mr. Tan sent his guy over to pick it up rather than wait for the delivery and my boards were actually just finished.

All I can say is, I am quite happy with the service, which is much economical and better than the first one I went to years ago. There is not such thing as a minimal order but more like, they will give you as much boards as possible on a single plate, which is the same size as their standard film. So, depending on your design, for the same amount you might get more or less unless you needed a specific number. So, my design of roughly 1 inch x 2 inch yielded me a lot of boards. Lots more than I know what to do with it besides making them into key-chains.

There are actually a few pieces but I am not going
to tell you how many. Mr. Tan took one piece and
then 'broke' it into half and then again, until there
are four pieces. Yes, each slide yields four fibre-
glass pieces! Not SRBP (Synthetic Resin Bonded
Paper which is fragile to soldering iron heat) but
fibre-glass! Wahoo!

Test fit of some of the components, which everything
is perfect except for the IC and voltage regulator. I
even designed the board to accept smaller resistors.

OK, here it is. The PCB design for the voltage regulator
is out of place and I must have chosen the wrong one
event though on the print out it was OK. So, I had to
bend the legs a little (see red lines)

Another fail is that the board was 1.6m thick and I
made the mistake of not specifying it to be thinner.
But then again, they told me it was 1.6mm since I
asked them last year. I forgot about that. Next, I'm
worried about the overall height after everything is
fitted. It could be as high as one inch and this could
be a problem if I wanted to fit the whole thing into
the sauser area. I could have gone SMT but this is
expensive and some of the parts cannot be bought
locally. I know as I've searched everywhere for it.

Not bad for a DIY SMD pad! I know my eyesight is
getting worse and so, as not to push it, this board
will have only two SMD components. Maybe with
other projects, I might consider going SMT but I
have to see how to overcome my eyesight problem

Another thing I was pleasantly surprised was that
they could etch the lines without any problems. So
this means in my future designs, I can make thinner
tracks. Oh, the solder mask is a standard feature for
them, which is a nice thing. The green mask makes
the board so professional....

So now, I am going to make sure the software for the chip is perfect. Everything is almost complete except for the NCC-1701A Navigation and strobe light timing which is giving me problems as there is limited memory in the microprocessor. Maybe I should try another approach to calculate the timing sequences so that it does not use so much codes.....