2024-03-08 - breaking out
ordered a few of these electrocookie prototyping boards because they're the perfect width to stick 2 3.5" jacks in each corner and have room for a 16 pin dip socket in the middle. that's perfect for the dac, and it also works for the gpio outputs. over the last few days, i put those together. the numbering on the gpio board is...real bad. i kept getting my wires crossed (lol) as i turned the board over. it was supposed to have a pattern across the whole board. instead i have one clockwise cluster and one counter-clockwise cluster. fuck you. leaving it.
i had a stupid moment during these. when i went to test the dac board, it didn't work. i couldn't do diagnostics for another day or so, but when i could poke around with a multimeter it was immediately clear that one of the positive rails didn't have voltage. when i started on the dac board, i initially went ahead and made jumpers between the two sides' + and - rails. then i flipped the thing over and saw that there were paths built into the board to connect the sides. awesome, i thought. i clipped off the jumpers and went on with the assembly.
and that was the real error, because those paths didn't actually connect the sides. on each end of the board were a pair of vias i hadn't noticed...and appeared to be where you're supposed to connect the rails together, if you want that to be the case. that makes sense in retrospect. the other prototype boards i've used didn't have those, i wasn't thinking that fancy. so i bridged the rails together and the dac board works perfectly. huzzah!
now i'm going to focus back on software for a bit. i do need to make a signal/power distribution board, something i can connect to the rpi with an old ide cable and not have to fiddle with counting pins. it's already much cleaner than being on the breadboard, so for now this is a good stopping point.
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