Blog #2: Getting my feet wet with taBLE Assistant

Introduction

Well, the past week has flown by pretty quickly.

I placed my parts order early in the week and have been waiting for delivering, which finally arrived yesterday. There was a minor delay with a part stock-out but thankfully there was a substitute part. As I had written up most of what I wanted to say in this blog, I'll append some comment about my goodies and show a few pictures at the end.

3D Modelling and Designing Enclosures

So, for this week I decided to look at the physical side such as designing a table based enclosure for my PSoC 6 Pioneer Kit.

I still use an old version of Sketchup, namely Sketchup 8 Pro, for these sorts of things as I am most familiar with this package, but it does have niggles, especially when doing small stuff like PCB components. Also, a big issue I’ve always had with Sketchup is that there has been no easy way to take a PCB “.brd” file and convert it to a Sketchup file. There are ways for Eagle files through scripts but it is convoluted. What makes this task trickier is that the PSoC 6 .brd files that come with the PSoC 6 Pioneer Board and the E-Ink Display Shield hardware documentation were not designed using Eagle and appears to have been done using Cadence Allegro PCB Designer. I found no conversion shortcuts here unfortunately.

So, I decided to move beyond the familiar and see if there is any new software out there that could be used instead to create 3D diagrams, schematics and any PCB design, should I need them. So after a little online searching I came across some new software, namely FreeCAD and some documentation on their wiki page that described a way to create the PCB footprint from SVG and convert this to a Collada file in order to open up in FreeCAD to then create the 3D design. Thus, the conclusion I reached was that FreeCAD certainly looks interesting and appears to be the way kiCAD is going when it comes to 3D rendering. Hence, it looks to have great potential. A case of watch this space...

Then, I had a bit of luck as I decided to go to the Inkscape website (https://inkscape.org/en/) – only because I wanted to check that I had the correct link for my blog. I discovered that there was a new version out for 2018 and so updated mine.

What I then learnt, which made me well pleased, was that you can now save your SVG files as DXF files (AutoCAD plot files). This meant that I could now import these DXF files directly into Sketchup. Suddenly I was back to the land of familiarity and decided to put FreeCAD aside for another day.  I could now make speedy progress as I no longer had to redraw from scratch using Sketchup or go through the hoops with scripts a fixes when converting.

This discovery made life a whole lot easier and I was now able to create a nice accurate 3D representation of my PSoC 6 Pioneer board in a fraction of the time.

I found this to be very accurate and was able to align the EPD shield with by PSoC 6 Pioneer Board almost perfectly (was dependent of the pin headers and socket components being perfect which is not always the case.

The conversion process starts by opening up the specific PDF pages in Inkscape, such as the solder mask and silkscreen pages, then saving these pages as AutoCAD .dxf file type. Now open up Sketchup 8 Pro and import the dxf file. The import process works seamlessly if you make sure that the dimensions are all in inches (my American friends will be happy with that). At first I had problems with the dimensions and it required a fair bit of trial and error before discovering the magic formula. And that is it.

Now that that I have a good 3D representation of my Pioneer board out the way, I can now work on the enclosure side at a later time as the need arises.  A more pressing task at hand is starting having a play with my new goodies.

Taking a first glance at my Micro:bit (part inside box of Goodies)

Unboxing is always fun as more often than not I find there is stuff I ordered that is a surprise. In this case it was the micro:bit and the enclosures I ordered for the micro:bit. They are much smaller than expected which I am very pleased about. As you can see the micro:bit comes with the usual leaflets and a getting started guide.

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The only issue I have discovered is the battery contact in the enclosure is not great. In my next blog will have a look at this in more detail and go through some of the processes to get up and running with a micro:bit as I have never used one before. Should be fun!