I wanted to spice things up a little bit here and show the past/present/future design iterations of the happyfuntouch system. We’ll start out with the first PCB I ever manufactured.

I spent about $300 total on 6 of these PCBs, and had them produced and assembled in malaysia. It cost $40 shipping alone just to send the parts there, but I messed up and only sent them enough parts to make 3 complete boards. On top of all that, I used the wrong footprint for a shift register which rendered the boards useless. It was my first big failure of this project.

The boards consist of 32 multiplexed Phototransistors and 8 current-sink driven, shift-register switchable LEDs. I designed them to test the Scanning FTIR principle on a small scale, so each board has it’s own amplifier stage for the phototransistors and they cannot be daisy chained. This inefficiency was quickly realized and fixed for future iterations.

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