Once again I have a bit of a lapse in blog posting. I think that'll be the case indefinitely here as the general circumstances that draw me here tend to shift with the seasons. While writing about things may vary, me building things won't, so I guess just expect stuff like this.

Cue Modules are complete!

So the cue modules are pretty much perfect now -- the logic issue with the shift register carryover was addressed in the most recent revision and with the manufacturing-friendly design, 20/20 of them survived and are tested in the enclosure. I started printing the tops in white, which disperses the status lights neatly.

The color isn't as indicative of the newer version - ultimately the best way to tell is looking at the # of capacitors sticking out - 1 = old, 2 = new. I can turn these out pretty quick. 20 of them is plenty for testing and whatnot, so I'm probably done making these.

I destroyed all but one of the V4 receiver boards.

Well this wasn't necessarily the fault of the design... I had began to integrate the v0.4 boards into the receivers and solder the battery connections. At a certain point past that, I decided I wanted to solder in a new resistor for the battery voltage divider circuit as apparently the range of the ADC is 0-2.5v, not 0-3.3v... So I'd gone about doing all of that while the battery was still connected. What this resulted in likely was at some point, me shorting the 8.4v from the pack right into one of the GPIO pins of the ESP32. This cooked part of the chip, and really finished them off once I powered the board up off the onboard 5v. One board even began to runaway and smoke, causing me to make the split second decision of trying to un-solder the battery connection, or bail and grab the almost burning battery and chuck it in the sump pit in the nearby crawlspace. I took option A. The good news is I had one working board, the one I'd updated the resistor on before connecting the battery. That one worked wonderfully... but I need to test a lot of these simultaneously to really proof them.

I'm now doing all the things

I'd set out on this to primarily make a kick ass firing system that met or surpassed the capabilities of firing systems on the market, as well as provided me with a solid reason to learn a bunch of stuff. The amazon/ebay NRF24L01+ modules were, to say the least, frustrating. The ones that were semi-passable were about 8 bucks a piece, which then constituted 1/4 the cost of an entire receiver module. And that semi-passable came with being unable, due to shitty controlled impedance on the board, to even work at max TX/RX strength as the signal reflected so much it effectively drowned itself out. So when I put together a run of 30 v0.5 receiver boards, I added another on the panel, the v0.6, with an integrated NRF24L01+ and LNA/PA IC. Really the only update with the v0.5 was the corrected sense resistor into the battery voltage circuit.