09-27-2019, 11:36 AM
Had a great pow wow with our extended development team this week.
First, we met with Paul who is our circuit design and PCB layout mentor. He's got 30 years experience working on electronic musical instruments, primarily as lead design engineer for commercial scale virtual pipe organs. We were having an issue with the USB hub controller not consistently starting on one of the prototype boards. Turned out we were missing a critical capacitor on the 1.8V power output from the integrated regulator. That was the last thing we needed to understand before starting the next PCB layout!
Another big development is, after some more prototyping, we are planning to move to an even faster MCU. Not because its necessary for MRCC, but because we need it for future projects so we might as well start now. Its the fastest MCU on the market, 600MHz, way overkill for MIDI routing and effects but also very low power and great feature set. Its a little cheaper than the current one as well, amazing. The challenge will be the high pin count, fine pitch BGA (Ball Grid Array) routing on the PCB. Paul has offered to help with this, he's got the experience with BGA layout.
Last night we met with Ben and Nick. Ben is a veteran mechanical engineer (and just got his EE degree as well), and Nick is an award winning industrial designer and user interface expert. We had a great brainstorming session on the enclosure design. We are now leaning towards using an extruded aluminum enclosure. Ben will send us some sample drawings to help decide. The enclosure will support rack ears so we can make it work for desktop and rack.
We'll share that enclosure design as soon as we can!
First, we met with Paul who is our circuit design and PCB layout mentor. He's got 30 years experience working on electronic musical instruments, primarily as lead design engineer for commercial scale virtual pipe organs. We were having an issue with the USB hub controller not consistently starting on one of the prototype boards. Turned out we were missing a critical capacitor on the 1.8V power output from the integrated regulator. That was the last thing we needed to understand before starting the next PCB layout!
Another big development is, after some more prototyping, we are planning to move to an even faster MCU. Not because its necessary for MRCC, but because we need it for future projects so we might as well start now. Its the fastest MCU on the market, 600MHz, way overkill for MIDI routing and effects but also very low power and great feature set. Its a little cheaper than the current one as well, amazing. The challenge will be the high pin count, fine pitch BGA (Ball Grid Array) routing on the PCB. Paul has offered to help with this, he's got the experience with BGA layout.
Last night we met with Ben and Nick. Ben is a veteran mechanical engineer (and just got his EE degree as well), and Nick is an award winning industrial designer and user interface expert. We had a great brainstorming session on the enclosure design. We are now leaning towards using an extruded aluminum enclosure. Ben will send us some sample drawings to help decide. The enclosure will support rack ears so we can make it work for desktop and rack.
We'll share that enclosure design as soon as we can!