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tedlanghorst / OpenOBS-328

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Adafruit breakout board #7

Open RiceSteve opened 1 month ago

RiceSteve commented 1 month ago

Hi Ted, see below. We have the Adafruit breakout boards as suggested but they don't fit the sensor head. Either we have printed the heads incorrectly or the boards are too big by about 1mm. There isn't any excess to shave off the board and in any case, one of the components is hard against the board edge on one side. Maybe Adafruit have redesigned the board? JCLPCB are still not able to supply the original design. thanks for any advice. Steve

Unfortunate that JLCPCB doesn't have the VCNL4010 in stock. Keeping parts in stock has been problematic since covid but getting better the past ~2 years. I would recommend against soldering the VCNL4010 yourself unless you (or your techs) have experience and equipment for SMD parts. Especially for 5 sensors, I would recommend this [breakout board from adafruit], which is compatible with everything. Let me know if you can't find these in the UK. I have a several of ours left over from a batch order.

RiceSteve commented 4 weeks ago

PS. I think the reason that JLCPCB cannot fulfil the order is because of the total number of assembled turbidity PCBs being 5 x 20 (5 panels each with 20 PCBs) when all I need is 5 PCBs. The minimum order for panels is 5, so if there was a way to have 1 PCB per panel that might work with the stock of VCNs that they have...

tedlanghorst commented 4 weeks ago

Hi Steve,

I should have clarified in the instructions some where, there are 2 versions of the sensor head because the Adafruit version is slightly wider. Can you try printing this version? Let me know if you already printed that version, maybe something changed with their PCB.

RiceSteve commented 3 weeks ago

Thanks Ted. We printed this version: hardware/3D_print/custom_pcbs/sensorhead_v2.3mf. Is that the standard version for use with the original PCB, rather than Adafruit substitute? Steve

RiceSteve commented 3 weeks ago

Hi again Ted,

It is not easy, at this stage, to get the alternative version of the sensor housings printed. It would be easier to put the Adafruit boards to one side for a rainy day and revert to the original turbidity boards that fit the housings we have printed.

The issue there is that the minimum number of assembled boards I can get from JCLPCB using the current files is 40 (minimum 5 panels, 20 PCBs per panel, minimum 2 panels assembled = 40 assembled PCBs) but they don't have sufficient stock of VCNL-4010s to produce 40. From what I can tell they have 13 in stock.

I only really want 5 assembled boards at this point. I know there are economies of scale and that's why 20 board panels make sense, but to overcome the component shortage, is it possible to produce a Gerber file that yields a single PCB? I can then order 5 and have all 5 assembled. I don't know if this has implications for the placement file and, I don't know if what I am asking for is a big 'ask' in terms of work required...

thanks Steve

tedlanghorst commented 3 weeks ago

Gotcha, no it's not a big ask, but I won't be able to get around to it until Friday, unfortunately. I'll let you know when I upload a single-board version of the files!

Ted

RiceSteve commented 3 weeks ago

thanks Ted - that will be a huge help - very grateful.

tedlanghorst commented 1 week ago

Sorry for the delay! Here are the files with just a single board. https://github.com/tedlanghorst/OpenOBS-328/tree/main/hardware/PCBA/turbidity/single_board

Ordering is really simple, you don't need to change any of the default settings on JLCPCB. It will say that two parts are not specified in the BOM when uploading the assembly files, but that's fine just continue.

RiceSteve commented 1 week ago

thanks Ted!! Extremely grateful for this.