Once again lots has happened, and my two readers were wondering what was going on. So since last time, there have been two revs of PID controller. One AT90USB1287 based board and an LPC1768 (arm based board). The AVR is being finicky and Dave and I are still trying to bring the board up. The ARM board (pictured above) seems to be working fine. I’ve got a USB bootloader running on it. The bootloader works by making the board look like a mass storage device when you plug it in. Then all you do is drag and drop a “firmware.bin” file on to it, and it it programmed, very nice. There is still a tonne of firmware development to do on this board before it does what it is supposed to. This board is nice, since the LPC has a lot of stuff on board that the avr does not. So we don’t need extra external RAM and glue logic, real time clock.

Once the AVR board is running, we’ll finish assembling the solder reflow ovens.

I’ve also put together my version of the word clock and got it basically running. We have a laser engraver on order that I really excited about, so I’ll have fun making solder stencils, and making professional looking front panels now.