There’s really a short in my brain now
I got my new, beautiful boards from JLCPCB this week. I feel the revision was totally worth it! I love the look of the black solder mask and the white silkscreen.
During this last week, I went through the same process as before to populate my new circuit boards. I give more details on this in a previous blog post.
The problems begin…
After the boards got populated I had to do my least favorite hardware task: debugging. Below you can see I had an issue with one board, not all the LEDs were lighting up as they should. Since the circuit is so simple, I know the issue is an unconnected or dead LED. I removed that pixel and you can see in the image on the right that one pad didn’t get soldered because the paste didn’t reflow. Replacing the LED fixed it!
Broken LED chain
Unsoldered LED pad
Here you can see my fabulous, new mechanism for connecting the two boards together. At this point, all 160 LEDs were lighting up perfect! I soldered the two boards together, assembled the sculpture, and left for the night.
In the morning I tried powering my brain and I had a short. This was super frustrating because I tested the circuit at every step of population (or so I thought!). After some debugging with my multimeter, I realized my bigger, badder, stronger pads I used to solder the two boards together were actually shorting power of one board to ground of the other. I had to desolder the two boards and re-attach using hot glue like you see below.
This is the problem in my schematic
Here’s the fix in EAGLE and I’ve updated my repo with brains V12 which don’t have this shorting problem! Ground ground ground ground ground ground ground
She’s beautiful and she works! :’)
User Testing Day!
Here are some pics from user testing with other thesis students. Somehow, brain v1 broke on the trip over from my staging space to the user testing classroom! It’s really perplexing and frustrating, but something I need debug in the future.
Here’s some feedback I received that could be helpful:
Try free writing about what the project/process means to me
I can put parts of myself (nails, hair, eyelashes) into the resin knobs
All the sculptures seem like they are from a different POV, watching yourself from the outside
Include the drawn portraits as decoration, maybe people can make their own?
Face synth - play back samples of voice reading back personal texts