SMD January – VHS 5th Anniversary LED Badge

The VHS 5th Anniversary LED badge is a Atmel 168 based board with an Altera CPLD driving a two colour 8×16 LED matrix.  Other features include a 5 way joystick, separate button, expansion header for i2c peripherals and a microphone.  The board was designed by Richard Sim and will be partly assembled by you!

We did a marathon assembly effort in September and 75% of the 40 boards have about 90% of the components loaded.  This workshop is for you to help load the remaining 10% of the components and walk away with a badge.  The hard stuff is done, only small pin count devices remain to be loaded.  The assembly might be done Henry Ford style (one person does same parts on all boards) or per individual.  The parts will not be separated into kits prior to the workshop so attendance is kinda necessary.

Basic download images and programming hardware will be available for the CPU and CPLD.  Further programming will require an device capable of programming an AVR (Arduino, Bus Pirate, STK500, AVR dragon etc) and/or the Altera CPLD (altera usb blaster or compatible).

The project is open hardware/open source, you can find the pcb details at https://github.com/vhs/vhs-pcbs/tree/master/led-matrix and the software at https://github.com/vhs/VHSLEDMatrixBadge.  These might be refined prior to the event.

We have enough board and parts for about 30 people.  We’re releasing tickets for 24 over two nights to allow some breathing space.

We can accomodate varying levels of soldering skill, it would be best if you’ve already some smd experience.

This workshop is members first, if we can’t make the numbers, we’ll release it to non members.  Price excludes eventbrite fee as this is already below Richard’s cost.

Please bring a soldering iron and a magnifier if you can.

There are two dates available, Thursday Jan 9th and Thursday Jan 16th, both from 7pm onwards.  Credit card tickets at Eventbrite – cash payers, please contact the organiser.