I’ve been working on this board since 2009 and it almost became my first commercial product. However, the Battlestar Galactica Cylon came and it was much more exciting to say the least. So, it is now more than 10 years on and looking back at the almost complete stage, I realised my design has evolved a lot. Originally, I designed this jsut for myself and a few friends but because the PCB manufacturer at that time required a certain MOQ, I was left with quite a handful of boards.
Technically, this is my very first board so the components are through-hole complete with IC sockets and voltage regulators. But then again, this was before it was easier to get stuff online and everything was more or less sourced locally in Malaysia. Suffice to say, it really drained my savings.
This board was a first on many levels. From my first venture into professional made PCB, first PIC programming and so on. You can select any of the four ships via two jumpers. It was quite an experience rewinding, timing and re-timing the light sequences for the four ships in the Movies. In some scenes, they are not really that consistent and well, I just settled for the best and averaged them out.
The last sequence I did was the 2009 JJPrise which has double and triple flashes. It was not an issue with the programming but for the triple flashes, you need to be an electronics expert and good at soldering to get that signal from the board. Then you need to drive it via a series of transistors.
Sorry there is no voice or title as I did not know how to add them.
The board was designed to be part of a series of modules for the Polar Lights 1/350 NCC-1701A Enterprise. So, this module handles the Red/Green Navigation and White Strobes. Not wanting to waste the extra memory in the chip, I decided to add more Nav/Strobe sequences to it:
NCC-1701 The Motion Picture (2:22)
NCC-1701A Star Trek VI (2:41)
Enterprise NX-01, and (2:58)
2009 NCC-1701 Enterprise aka JJPrise with the outputs switched (3:35)
The Project has stopped because I did not have the skills to draw proper Ship silhouettes for all the four ships for a manual, no budget for the PIC chip (they might even be obsolete now) and yeah, all that crimping to wire up the LEDs…
