This is what the finished product looked like after 4 attempts.
I have tested the board with success, however, the LED board didn’t come out so well. I will have to redo the PCB as the lands came off.
This is what the finished product looks like with all the components.
And this is what the back side looks like after assembly. The, what looks like wet blotches, is solider flux. Very useful to DE-oxidize prototype boards.
Please give me feed back as to what anyone thinks. I am hopefully going to have this circuit in working order later and post that as well. I will see if I can post the bread board test circuit video as it will show its functions.
I was looking at your board and thought I would offer some helpful advice pertaining to making homemade circuit boards. 1) When it comes to software the best freeware available is DipTrace. I used Eagle for years than ran across DipTrace and have never looked back, so you might want to try it, besides it’s free. 2) When you use toner transfer paper board preparation is very important as well as the printer your using and method of heating the transfer/board. Always wet sand the copper surface with fine sand paper (400-600 grit) until the surface has a matte finish then wipe with acetone or other oil free solvent. If you’re having problems with the toner coming off while the board is in ferric chloride this is a major factor. Also, the type of toner your printer uses is a big factor, Brother for example uses a higher temp toner which doesn’t transfer very well. Most printer toners melt below 400 Deg. F, which is what you want but some are much higher. HP and Samsung printers work well in my experience. Last but not least is method you use to heat and press the transfer on to the board. You can use a ordinary iron to transfer to the PCB but you usually get inconsistent results. A T-shirt press works pretty good if you have one but the best thing to use is a laminator, preferably one of metal construction with temp control. If you do everything right with the right equipment you will get consistent, quality results and no wasted materials. Hope this helps and good luck on your future projects.
Thanks Twilight for your post. I’ll look into the software diptrace, and get a laminator. The problems you described are the ones I was having. I finally got a good board however it took a while to do so. I have finished part of the circuit and posted the function. Please tell me what you think. I programmed the LED sequence myself with my own twist. The bread board is the complete function with the firing lights, wand lights, and bar graph.
Hi, I am using Circuit wizard and have worked out a basic proton pack lighting. I want to build on it so that the lights speed up when the trigger is pressed and then cuts out after 30secs or so. The problem I have is how to go about doing this, Any suggestions, diragrams, etc would be a great help and I am will to share results too.
Hey GaryC, what I would do is use PIC’s to do the work for you. I enjoy programming them and its not to hard to learn either. You can do what you want to with conventional circuit components but, you’ll end up with a very large board. PIC’s however, you can program your inputs and outputs all on a single chip and control what they do through your program. No need for timing chips, flip flops, crystals, etc. I built a digital clock for my final in collage using such components. It took the hole bread board up with wires hanging off the side. That would be my advice to you. There are tons of sites out there that teaches you how to program PIC’s. MPlab by microchip give you the software to setup and program microchip PIC’s for free, and you can purchase there PIC’s on there website.
Gary. You won’t be able to pull that off with just static ICs. You will need a programmable microcontroller. PICs are great as are arduinos. If you’re more comfortable with programming in C, I would highly recommend arduino. The nano has a fairly small footprint and still gives you a ton of input/output pins.
The IC are programmable, it works with a mixture of them. I Have managed to program everything with circuit wiz, and seems to be working correctly. I’ll take a look at the other program out there too. Thanks for the input guys.
What programmable chip are you using? All you need to do is tell it to increase a modifier the longer the fire button is pressed. So, say every 1000 milliseconds, the modifier is increased by a factor of 1 (just making a number up for now), so say you want the chip to pulse every 50 milliseconds, set the clock pulse as 50/modifier. As the modifier grows, the clock pulse becomes quicker. That’s the basic jist of how I’m setting my arduino to handle an increase in pack light cycling as the fire button is held.
My current setup is the arduino pulses a set of chained 4015 shift registers for the power cell lights. Each shift register sends a clock pulse to a 4017 decade counter that handles the cyclotron. So, on light 7 and 14, a clock pulse is sent to the 4017 to advance the cyclotron to the next light.
Haven’t post is quiet a while. To Finish this out, I use microchip PIC’s. You can get the software from www.microchip.com. Download the MPLAB X IDE to program in either assembly or C. Also you can purchase the chips through them or mouser electronics, jameco electronics, digikey, etc. I use the PIC16F628A and the 12F509 because I already had a few. There are plenty of tutorials on how to setup and use the software. Thanks for all the posts.
