Thanks for your help yesterday. Another quick question, I am attempting to print the schematic for the POV Blinky version 1.7 that you were kind enough to send me, but Kicad complained about a whole slew of libraries being absent, when I started it. When I reviewed t the schematic to print, it was littered with question marks.
I see that the W & L symbol library is loaded in the project, I’m surprised that it didn’t have what it needed.
Any help on how to resolve this. I am quite the KiCad newbie?
Hi, I’m a bit confused. The schematic I sent you was a PDF or PNG copy, right? There shouldn’t be any issues in printing an image file like that.
I’m guessing that you are trying to print the schematic from Kicad? Kicad is going through somewhat of a transition right now in terms of schematic symbol names and library organization, so things may be a bit tricky for the next few months until the stable release. I honestly haven’t loaded the Blinky POV schematic in Kicad in a year or so.
Sorry, I continue to be just a little off in my posting of subject lines.
The board design I was (attempting) to refer to was v 1.07. Yes I am trying to print the schematic in KiCad as I wanted to review where the connections go hither and fro, to the FTDI connector for example.
I reviewed the page you suggested, it seems most versions are there as PDF downloads, except version 1.07? If that is available as a PDF it would be great!
I see, it looks like v1.07 was the beta test board we produced in limited quantities that also had an FTDI pinout, which was removed later.
What exactly are you trying to do or trying to learn from the schematic? That may be more straightforward to help with.
Anyway, here is a screenshot of the v1.07 schematic. There are still some questionmark blocks, but they don’t matter. I think the issue is that the schematic was using standard Kicad symbols back from 2009, which have been renamed since then so they aren’t found anymore. But, it doesn’t matter that they are questionmark blocks, since they are just the pin header connection symbols.
Let us know if you have any more questions about the schematic!
I needed a little help figuring out what the jumpers did that switched out RA0, and RA1, a requirement for ICSP programming and serial up-link, I think?
Did you use a software serial port to the FTDI chip? The way I program, if I don’t have serial port to send debug messages I’m pretty much lost!
Originally we thought that we’d have to disconnect the LEDs that share the two ICSP clock/data lines, but we found that ICSP worked just fine even with the LEDs connected. That’s why we removed the jumpers in later versions.
There is no FTDI chip on the blinky PCB, which is why we added header pins for an FTDI cable. The Blinky PIC has a serial port peripheral inside, that can do rx/tx on the two pins that we connected to the FTDI cable header pins.
You can look at the Blinky bootloader code to see some of the serial debugging code we used while developing the blinky optical programming code. Also take a look at the DEBUG flag that can be used to enable serial port debugging via FTDI cable.
