Updates in ARM Development…
I’ve been pretty busy lately… I recently designed and built my Science Fair project board–I’m still working out all of the bugs in the hardware, but I’m getting there. The project is about embedded networking and encryption on an ARM microcontroller (I chose the Philips LPC2148). I’ll post full details on the project when I’m done with it.
This was my first real PCB. It is almost completely all surface mount, with the exception of a few headers, serial port and stuff like that. The passive component’s size is 0805, which I thought would be a good start with smt. I discovered that smt is awesome. It is much more convenient than through-hole, and you don’t have to reach around and flip the board in all kinds of directions if you need to desolder something.
Since I had little time after developing the schematic in two weeks, I rush designed the board in about 3 days. In the end, not too bad. I chose the wrong component packages for a few things, but I made them fit when I soldered them down. That’s all cosmetics. As for true design mistakes, I shared the TXD0 and RXD0 UART pins of the microcontroller with chip select and interrupt pins on an ethernet controller which happens to hold them high (thus screwing up my uart channel), and I think I messed up the SO/SI - MISO/MOSI lines on the spi. Well, it’s all correctable with wire wrap wire.
Continue reading for more info and cool pictures.