Bus Pirate v3: Beating the shortage

[ian]

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http://dangerousprototypes.com/2009/07/29/bus-pirate-v3-beating-the-shortage/

I'm working up a v3 PCB with an SSOP PIC to beat the shortage of SOIC PICs. Availability of the SS version is better in the US and in China.

[Scorpia]

nice idea.

is it worth putting both the tx and rx lights on for the fdti chip?

Also have you swapped the pgc and pgd pins around on the icsp header?

i havnt checked the schematic but are there any spare i/o on the pic. is it worth trying to put them out on an extra header for "future expansion" etc.

Peter

[Scorpia]

oh and mounting holes would be nice.

[Scorpia]

i was thinking is it worth designing the board to fit a case? could be something simple. add a right angle 10 pin header and it should be pretty easy to do.

anyway just a thought

[ian]

Are there standard dimensions for a case, or mounting holes? I'll be sure to leave clearance for a 90degree header.

I really want to swap PGC/PGD. It'll mean a new bootloader for this revision and the routing is a bit messy.

[Scorpia]

can i ask how swapping the two pins around effects the bootloader?
dont the 2 pins just get shorted when its in bootloader mode?

as for standard dementions for a case well i dont think there are any. it would be a matter of selectign a case and designing it for it.

im guessing seed could point you in the direction of a case that they can get.

[ian]

For the bootloader - one pin is twiddled, the other watches for a match. If there are accidental matches, the jumper can be moved over one position to ground the watching (input) pin. If I swap them, then the firmware has to swap which pin get's twiddled and which is an input, or moving the jumper shorts the output pin to ground. For the new POST mode, the inner pin will need to be taken high, which will generate a mismatch in the bootloader and trigger the power-on self-test mode for quality control (QC will be automated in the future).