Sunday, February 10, 2013

Remote appliance controller update

So an update on the remote appliance controller project. I have been busy with school and work so I didn't have a lot of time to work on it over the last couple of weeks. However, this weekend I got a change to lay out the second board (transmitter/remote control).

Here is the transmitter board I just layed out:


The challenge of this is that this board is really small. The mistake I made with the first board is I didn't choose an enclosure first. For this board I chose a small enclosure and create the mechanical outline of the board first. Then the challenge was to route everything. This board is only about 2.25 x 1.25 in! To make things worse it has a battery holder (which is mounted on the bottom) so that prevented me from putting any vias other than ground in that area.

As I mentioned I didn't choose a enclosure before designing the receiver board, so I had to find a bigger one and modify the board to fit it:


Just to get a perspective on the size of these things:



Now I just need to check everything over well and I think I will order these boards from sparkfun.com's batchpcb.com. I've never used their service but it seems like a pretty good deal for small quantity boards. Check back soon for updates!