The PKD2019 Board
I am using the 4.01 Board which arrived from JLCPCB last month. The board is a good fit and the modified left LEDs used to secure the board works. After playing with it for a while, I realised there is still a lot of memory in the chip. This means I can program more elaborate lighting effects. Plus, I only used 5 ports out of 6 maximum ports on the microcontroller. So, I can design the 6th port to use another switch which will give me an additional 2 more lighting patterns. But after thinking about it, this board would never complete its prototyping stage because I kept adding more features to it. Moreover, with so much lighting effect for the Blaster, I would be bastardising and insulting the design.
So, the only (and hopefully, last) change here would be to have the bottom red LED steadily flash, like scanning for something. I’m limiting the effect to only two modes and I will stop at the next revision, which would be version 5.0
The Ghost Board
This board gave me a very serious problem during testing. The issue is that the Ice Blue LEDs, which is just similar to White and Blue LEDs, needs at least 3.2 volts to light up. Imagine a fresh CR2032 battery, which has about 3.3volts, would suddenly be ‘flat’ when it reaches to 3volts. At this voltage level, the Ice Blue LEDs just glowed so dim, you’d think it was never lit at all. But for the normal PKD2019 Board, this is not an issue since the red LEDs would stay lit until the battery drops to about 2.2volts.
The only solution is to increase the voltage, which in this case, is to change the battery technology itself. The 3.7v Lithium Polymer (LiPo) battery would be the ideal solution. However, there is another problem with this approach; one would need a LiPo charger. I have found a nice little micro LiPo charger which you can see in the video below. The issue here is that they have very small soldering points.
If I were to solder the charger module into the board, you’d need to take out the whole PCB to plug in the USB-C cable. After the battery is fully charged, you’d need to re-insert it again. Do this a couple of times and the left side LED pair would fail. Alternatively, I can solder some wires between the board and charger but after some time, the wires would fail from too much flexing. I think in the end is that I’d just provide a pair of connectors for the LiPo battery, you guys just figure out how to charge it…
Update: I have decided to use the darker green LEDs.
Where to get what (no, not the Boards and I have not produced them not got a link to sell them yet):
AndersFP (Anders Fogde Pedersen) PKD-2019 Blaster Download File
