Behringer FCB1010: FCBInfinity picking up speed

Finally starting to make some big steps. I have everything soldered onto the new PCB and instead of soldering wires directly to the board it now has nice connectors, so I can connect stuff step by step. That allowed me to start putting the unit back together, so yesterday evening I had the new PCB in it’s final location and some of the optics hooked up. Unfortunately I had to order a new LCD, because a couple soldering pads got destroyed while trying to desolder the old (buggy) connector I had placed on it. It will probably arrive on monday. Fortunately I can continue development by implementing the basic MIDI stuff, I dont need the LCD for that (yet).

Everything soldered onto the new PCB

The bottom side of the new PCB

The location of the new PCB in the unit. This clearly shows why you need to remove the power supply and use a phantom power mod.

 

Below you can see the LED digits are working. The Green and Blue channel of the RGB-led on the left (the stompbox bank indicator) are now controlled by the expression pedals for testing purposes.

FCBInfinity, hello world!

 

Behringer FCB1010: PCB Bliss

Sorry for not updating a while, but here’s what happened in the meanwhile:

The DIY printed circuit board I created myself had some errors that I tried to fix by cutting some traces on the board and soldering new wires to replace the traces, while this worked it didn’t really feel dependable anymore. As I promised myself before, this thing should be tough and dependable. Though for testing I figured it should suffice and I could just order some nice manufactured PCBs in the meanwhile. Then I discovered another mistake in the design, as shown in the picture below I wired the connector for the upper button/led panel wrong. Led1, Led2, Led3, lbtn4, Led5, is not how the connector is wired 😛 Analysing the impact of this error led me to discarding my DIY-board alltogether, since it required me to reroute too many traces.

The reason I’m posting now is that the manufactured boards have finally arrived. Well, “finally”, because 1 week is blazingly fast in my honest opinion (props to www.eurocircuits.com). Yesterday I prepared a little bit by desoldering all the components from the old board, so tonight I can spend by soldering everything onto the new board. As you can see I ordered some extra boards, so once I’m done programming everything I will make those available to anyone interested (price yet to be decided). I’ve already updated everything on my FCBInfinity GitHub repository so you can make a PCB yourself or have one made for you by a PCB service. Everything will be open source, the source code as well, so you too can do anything you want with this device.

The shiny new PCBs manufactured by http://www.eurocircuits.com

Behringer FCB1010: Custom PCB update

Well, it shows this is the first time I do a project like this; things don’t go as fast as I want them to. While the board turned out fine for most parts, it seems I have made two errors in the design. The first is that the power regulator is backwards. The side that needs cooling and is bolted to the exterior of the FCB1010 is now faced inward (oops). The second error is that the expression pedals require an analog pin on the Teensy, due to a last-minute change in the design it seems they are hooked to a standard digital port at the moment. To remedy these two errors I unfortunately had to cut some traces on the board and relay the traces using some wires. Not really the way I wanted the board to end up, but I guess I will just finish it all up as-is. Of course I will fix the design and I’ll just have someone develop the new board for me (or more if you’re interested in a PCB of your own). Once I receive that board I will desolder everything and move it into the corrected PCB.

Howeverrrrr… most things work great now! The LCD, the RGB-led stompbox bank indicator, the Expression pedal circuitry, the LED digits, etc, etc, they all work! Now I just have to hook the two original button PCBs up to my board and start placing everything back in the FCB1010’s housing. Then I finally can start working on programming everything the way I want them to work. Soon, soon! 😛

Top side of the PCB, looking good

Bottom side, clearly shows the wires I had to use to fix my errors in the design

My new rack (so far)

Two days ago I have received my new bag of goodies all the way from America, through Germany to my little appartement in Holland. I must say the AxeFx in combo with the AtomicAmp cabs sound unbelievable. Mind == Blown, for sure. I wanted to let you folks know that tonight I will continue on the FCB1010 modification and quite possibly finish the soldering, drilling, hacking and sawing phase, so I can finally start on programming. Now I finally have the AxeFx (after a two month waitlist) I can finally start testing the Midi communications. Once I get the tuner on the LCD I’ll update here immediately 😉

My new setup

Behringer FCB1010: A fresh PCB!

Yesterday evening I finally got around to make a PCB. After making a testing etch I have found what would be the best method for me to approach this.

Tada! A freshly etched and drilled board, with the main components plugged in.

Toner Transfer

One of the toughest things was to find some proper way to protect the copper on the board from the etching material. I tried printing the design on some glossy photo paper, but while trying to perform the transfer using an iron I found out the hard way that the paper contained a lot of plastics, thus ending up with a piece of paper glued to my iron. 😛 Then I found an ingenious bloke on the Internet that used cheap advertising folders and papers to do the transfer. This paper is awesome because you can get it for free and people even bring it to you for free! 😛 Also it is very thin and easy to feel off with the help of a little warm water. Only printing on the paper was a little harder, the paper is so thin that my laser printer couldn’t really get a grip and started munching the paper. After some tries I just taped the cheap paper to a piece of normal printing paper and everything came out clean.

The idea with PCB design toner transfer is that the laser printer toner is based on a kind of plastic that melts at higher temperatures. Thus printing it on a paper and then ironing it to a copper board will transfer the plastic toner to the copper board, hence the name “Toner Transfer”. Awesome! … so, now what?

The design on the cheap paper

Ironing the paper to perform the toner transfer

Etching

After having the design ironed on the board, getting the copper etched off is fairly simple. I just used a commonly used Ferricchloride solution and bathed the copper board in there for about 10 minutes. After that time I ended up with a nice little board, but with the printer toner still on. Nothing that a little thinner can’t handle 😉

The board in the etching solution

The freshly etched board

After a little thinner the copper traces are clearly visible

Drilling

Aargh, etching the board was the fun part! Having to drill the 226 holes for the components and vias (a pathway from the top of the board to the bottom of the board) was a pain. Also while drilling I discovered that the top and bottom traces were slightly misaligned. So here and there I might run into some problems while soldering, but we’ll deal with that later. If it’s really a problem I might just have some company develop the board for me, because drilling was quite a lengthy job and simply a bore. Plus if you let someone else develop your board you only have to worry about soldering on your components, now I have to solder all the vias myself and I don’t have the nice green solder-stop protective coating. However, below is the etched board with some of the main components already in place. Tonight I will start on soldering all the components and quite possibly also be able to test the buttons and leds.

Drilling the 226 holes. Fun…

Bottom layer with the led digits and the max7219 chip to control the leds and digits

The top-side with the teensy, the connectors and the power regulator

Schematic v2

As promised I just redid the schematic for easier readability. I have also redesigned the PCB and added all the pins for the leds, buttons and other IO that isn’t mounted directly on the PCB. A new 3D shot of the PCB below. The new schematic can be viewed below, i’ve also added the PCB toner transfer for those who want to recreate this.

Tomorrow I’ll try to do the toner transfer to a copper board, IF I find some usable laser printer photo paper. I really want to finish up asap, because my AxeFx will arrive coming week (happy, happy!) 😛

 

EDIT: In the meantime this design has become obsolete. You can find all the recent schematics and renderings on GitHub/FCBInfinity.

FCBInfinity v2.0 Schematic

FCBInfinity v2.0 PCB Toner Transfer