TechnoFumbles.com - Fumbling around with technology

Updates on recent posts

It's been a few weeks since my last post, but rest assured that I've been quite busy working on more projects!

Homemade PCB

The home-made PCB in the previous post turned into a bit of a disaster when I tried to take the toner off the traces with a Scotch-Brite pad. It turns out that brute force and abrasive materials aren't the best way to remove toner from 0.2mm traces. Who'd have thought? ;) So I've etched the board again, and took the opportunity to revise the design slightly while I was at it, and this time tried acetone (well, nail-polish remover) to remove the toner. Acetone works much, much better than Scotch-Brite pads.

In the new revision of the board, I made the following changes:

• VIAs have a larger diameter for the pad-area as my drilling wasn't terribly accurate and I destroyed many VIAs on the original board.
• Clearance around many VIAs was improved to reduce the risk of solder bridges.
• Minor component positioning changes to shorten and simplify routing of traces.
• Added my name and URL to the top layer (it was already on the bottom layer).

Now all I have to do is get it soldered without any short circuits, and that's proving to be a big challenge!

V7 Navigation 1000 Menu Button

Shortly after posting the 'M' button fix with the steps required if you'd done the USB-port hack in another of my posts, I realized that it was entirely unnecessary to do any hardware modifications to fix the bug - rather you could do it all with just Explorer and a little back-and-forth with the SD card between your GPS and PC.

Anyway, life kept me from posting an update to that, but thankfully someone else has saved me the time! If you head on over to the always-awesome instructables.com, you will find a nice article by dadefatsax which explains all the necessary steps. Unlock V7 Navigation 1000 GPS.

posted by Richard Sim @ 2/13/2007 10:56:00 PM