Build of Deployable Units

[TerryJC]

Following discussions with Penri, I have reviewed the in-stock components and procured the following:

• MCP1700-3302E/TO, LDO Regulator, 250mA, 3.3 V. MOQ of 10 items.
• 2-off Raspberry Pi Zero W. These have now been limited to one per customer, so I had to order from two places, attracting two lots of P&P.

In stock I currently have one Raspberry Pi Zero W, two Regulators and plenty of DC-DC Converters, Veropins, Header Pins, etc, so I will be commencing the build of the third Tiny-TV Interface Boards this coming Weekend.

The two Interface Boards already constructed will be modified to remove the fourth connector and associated components, so that all five completed boards are identical.

[TerryJC]

The postings here viewtopic.php?p=4802#p4802 should have been here.

Penri,

A couple of things. First a couple of minor setbacks; Lynn has been down with some kind of a bug for the past couple of days, which has delayed progress a bit. Secondly, the original Prototype Interface that I built between August and October needs more rework than I anticipated. This will make things even tighter.

I'm still shooting for 'the end of the month', but that end-date may slip a bit.

[Penri]

Hope Lynn is feeling better, that’s much more important.

We now have a new deeper Dacombe shopfront, it will be painted over the next week or so.

I think I have a workable solution for getting 12V dc into the Holmans building, just a question of executing the plan now.

[TerryJC]

Unfortunately Lynn isn't any better. None of us had much sleep over the weekend, let alone time to build Tiny-TVs. I'm hopeful that things might improve in the coming days.

I have been able to produce a new set of drawings for each of the two variants, but I need a decent nights sleep to pluck up the energy to do much more.

To add to our woes one of our toilet cisterns stopped filling and our shiny new SMART Meters with In-home Display stopped working after the power cut last week. I've emailed the supplier but no response at all. I fixed the cistern myself.

Hopefully my next posting will be a bit less depressing.

[Penri]

Terry

Please, just concentrate on looking after yourselves, if I can be of any help please let me know.


Penri

[Penri]

I haven't sourced the enclosures for the Pi plus I/F boards yet so I've been looking at options based on your vero boards layout.

If possible I'd like to use a 190 by 140 by 70 but it may be a tight squeeze (it's attractive at £6.10 or thereabouts).

If that's looking like a no go then the next size up is 240 by 190 by 90 which should provide plenty of room (but is £11.15).

While writing this I've just had a though if I go for the smaller size for the single TinyTV installations and the larger ones for the multi-TinyTV installations that would control the costs sufficiently. Any thoughts?

Dimensions in mm and of the outside of the box.

[TerryJC]

As discussed in our Telecon Penri, I've focused on completing the second Multi-screen Tiny-TV Interface. There was a fault on the Veroboard which took me quite a while to diagnose, but I now have two Tiny-TV Interface Boards assembled (Tiny-TV1 and Tiny-TV2), which are both Multi-screen. I need to test both of these with the new screens that you have procured and will do that once the Minster Bells and Music System has been delivered to you.

This just leaves:

• Tiny-TV3 - Multi-screen.
• Tiny-TV4 - Single-screen.
• Tiny-TV5 - Single-screen.

To be assembled.

[TerryJC]

Penri,

I've tried four of the five new LED Displays that you gave me this morning and I'm afraid that none of them seem to be working properly. First, although they look identical to the old ones, they have a different number on the white label:

LED_Display_Types.jpg (1.17 MiB) Viewed 726 times

The new ones are as the one on the left and all have the same number. I only have one of the old type here, so I don't know if they are all the same as the one on the right.

The problem is that there is excessive flickering on all of the displays and with most of the images. I don't get that with the old type (although I have seen it before at different times in early development). This afternoon I'm going to try reattaching the Terminators (oriented so they are inside the confines of the screen frame). Hopefully that will fix it, but if it doesn't we may have to get in touch with Waveshare to find out what is going on.

[Penri]

Oh! that is disappointing news.

[TerryJC]

Yesterday afternoon's activities had to be curtailed because I had to sort out the care package for our friend and fit a key safe, so said care workers could get into his flat (plus the odd fireman as required!).

However, I did manage to attach a terminator board with no effect. However the board had to be fitted upside down and that made soldering difficult, so I'm going to recheck the board to ensure all lines were actually terminated. If that yields any results, I'll look into redesigning the terminator board so that it can be fitted more easily.

Before the above though, I'll go back to basics and fit one of the screens directly to the Pi and run the example code to establish that these boards actually work!