Wednesday, March 05, 2014

Pillar testing jig v1.1

I didn't like my initial version of the pillar testing jig much; it's too much work putting on 11 connectors and I'd have to use quite a bit of force to get the connector on, risking some bent leads. So I came up with the following contraption:
I can just clamp the anode leads between the two pieces of wood. There are connectors running through the top piece into the wires. And on the bottom side they touch the anode leads.
And when the pillar is clamped in it'll look like this:
It's just a few pieces of wire going through the wood, bent 90 degrees. But it works fairly well. As long as I press down on it all leads make contact, just gravity isn't enough. But hey, it only takes a couple of seconds to see if all LED leads are connected or not.
Unfortunately there's not demonstration video yet. I still have a small glitch somewhere in my protoboard which causes the bottom LED to light up brighter than the rest. To be more precise; when the DS line on the shift register goes high, the LED connected to Q0 lights up bright. And the other ones are just dim whenever they turn on.
 Great, I hate debugging hardware... :)

The ATtiny still needs to be installed, but I want to fix the brightness issue first. I also need some different connectors for the cathodes, these Dupont connectors simply aren't suitable for this kind of work.

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