I found a nice spot to put the Luminary microcontroller evaluation board on a large breadboard. This will make it easy to do experiments and software testing. Time to start working on my Circuit Cellar design competition.

Some single row sockets were installed into the test point holes. These sockets had long pins which will allow for plugging the module into another board in the future.

The sockets were found in some scraped parts and had to be modified so I don’t have a source for them. They had to be filed a bit to get them to stack side to side well. One nice thing about this setup is that you can still read the silk screen labels for each of the connection points. Be careful of the kind of sockets you use, they need to accept the standard bread boarding jumpers. The machine pin style sockets will not work for this.

Before installing the sockets you can use the microcontroller evaluation board to mark the holes. The back side of the board has on parts so it will sit flat on your target surface. I used a small drill bit in a pin vice to mark the drill holes. The electronics breadboard base was made of aluminum so it was easy to mark.

I used some short #4 standoffs that were scrounged from some other gadgets. One problem is that the JTAG header pins are so close to the edge the even the #4 screw heads were too close to the pins. I bent the pins slightly even though they were probably not touching. Also, on the end near the A/D potentiometer one of the pads is very close to the mounting hole. You can see the small fiber washer I put under the screw to protect from shorts.

This final shot shows part of my work bench. I am building up the parts inventory and tools as I can. So far my primary source for parts has been from scrounging with a heat gun. For tools, I already have a soldering iron and my pride piece is the Clever Scope which you can see between the PC speaker and the Weller soldering iron.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 28th, 2006 at 5:20 pm and is filed under Microcontroller, Projects, Lab Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.