So its Christmas break, a great time to move the project forward (one of many actually, this one is just most fun). So I spent the last several days doing non-stop work (so much for vacations :() Well, I am almost ready to do the circuit layout. I tried PCB Artist, but it keeps on crashing on me after I got a sizable chunk done, so I restarted the layout from scratch again and gEDA it is. While the learning curve is not very gentle, I love the fact that I can automate a lot of my tasks.
I must have spent close to a week triple checking I can add all the extension I want later, so now I am down to making the PCBs (or so I thought). As of now, there is two boards on the ground controller: main and debouncer (to be extended to usb and lcd). I got the main all sketched out, the dsPIC30F, 44pinTQFP device all hidden by many rat connections, only to realize how much power would be wasted by using LDO voltage regulators. Not very good, when I made so many sacrifices for power. So now I am stuck again doing research on DC/DC and buck converters...
Well I am heading back to crawling the nasty Internet.
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