Well I have time on my hands...

Nothing to do but wait for the board..... Started a full revamp of renosite.com. Hope to have alot more info hosted there as this project continues.

ordering board this weekend

The layout looks good will be ordering my first prototype board this weekend. If everything goes as planned will be assembling the fist avr32 high speed cd emulator within a few weeks. The boards from batchpcb.com takes a few weeks to process. Then some firmware tweak and ill be up and running!

Current progress

Ordering the parts for my first fully assembled prototype. Ended up deciding on a 4x20 lcd screen, sd card (iso storage) interface, 4 pushbutton interface input, AVR32 cpu (for the high speed interface), including a misc assortment of pcb parts. As soon as the parts come in i'm going to compare placement with the eagle pcb printout. If everything lays out correctly then I'll get the board printed through BatchPCB.com

Ordered a decent soldering station and all the misc items - good magnifying desk lamp, solder wick, solder paste, couple kinds of fluxes, etc... Been practicing soldering qfp packages. Its easer than I thought. The qfp144 pin package of the AVR32 scared me at first. Been mostly working with through hole. But hey now I know I can assemble the boards.

Currently parts and pcb cost for 1 off runs are about $120, but once It's all working I'll start making them in bigger batches to bring cost down.

Also tossing around the idea of bringing out the unused io pins for a cheap devel kit working with Atmels AVR32 framework - just modified to work with the lcd and switches the rest of the layout is based off of the EVK1104 (avr32, sd interface, usb hs, jtag, reset / gp - DFU Bootloader). Once the project is done, ill be deciding how far I want to explorer this route. If interested drop me an email: creno@csuoberlin.com

Till next time, thanks for your interest...