Mini K-Ceptor design

Dodo2207

@valor, ok thanks a lot. Ill try my best.

gorje

@valor l have seen in Chardata K-CEPTOR Rev 2.3b has i2c repeater on each pcb TCA9517,
but in your Kceptor mini pcb, I am not seeing it, have you removed it? why did you remove ? is it stable i2c without the i2c repeater?

valor

gorje The repeater was added to the original design at a later stage. See @daylanKifky 's comment above, from Dec '19th. For K-ceptors at the "arms-length" this was not neccessary. For me it seemed more important to provide a stable 3V3 rail so I figured, my Mini K-Ceptors should have 5V delivered to each board, which is subsequently regulated down to 3.3V which eliminates effects of voltage drop. The voltage drop actually even helps, since the regulator has to step-down slightly less voltage. I've not seen any i2c issues and I only tested upto 2-3 meter 4-wire phone cables as my main cabling despite my design supporting 6-wire "RJ12" cables.

daylanKifky

valor The repeater was added to the original design at a later stage.

Yes, And it was added as a precautionary measure for the last beta-testing program. We haven't had any issues with i2c before.
In fact, the repeater doesn't seem to add much stability to the bus compared with the previous KC. I haven't been able to test @valor's solution yet, but it would probably be more stable

DigitalStages

Hello Valor and/or anyone who knows!

I wonder, if you can help me finding those light pipe for the RGB LED.

Since I am working on cases for the current KCeptor, I would like to add this light pipes to the design.

As far as I know, there is one LED pipe per module.

Cheers

valor

DigitalStages
The Mini K-Ceptor led pipes are VLP-200-R. I used two of these per a Mini K-Ceptor
And the Mini HUB led pipes are VLP-500-R. I used three of these per a Mini HUB (one being reserved for the RGB status led)

DigitalStages

Thank you very much! Much appreciated. I will check for the pipe length I need.

moonspacedancer

hello, I am going to build your design and this may be a strange question but how many hubs per suit do I need? I know this is a more general question but haven't received a reply in the main forum and yours is the model I am building so thought I would just ask here.

valor

moonspacedancer you will only need one hub per suit.

seesemichaelj

Hey @valor; have you been able to successfully capture with your setup?

Stinde

Hi @valor Your design looks very interesting and I'm in a process to order the components. I have not used surface mount components before and I'm very curios how did you solder the LSM9DS1TR ?

Dodo2207

Hi Stinde,
I recreate the mini kceptor, as a beginner too and one is working 👍. Its a bit pain to solder the Imu. I added soldering paste on the pcb with a soldering mask. After that I placed all components on the pcb and used a hot air station on the lowest temp. Mine was at 300C. I hold it about 5cm above the Imu for short time. Dont use too much heat and time because you could damage the Imu!
With my other hand I added a little bit pressure on the Imu. I used cheap tweezers for that.
If you use a hot air station watch out that you dont blow the other components away.
I recomend you to start soldering with the Imu because its a pain to add him after the other components are solderd on.

If you want know a bit about what I did you can look at my Thread.

valor

Stinde I've used hot air gun on some of the boards, and reflow oven on the rest.
With a good solder paste, the IMU reflows nicely.

werbs

Hello valor, for the mini-hub, there are two lines in the BOM that contain (45) 100nF and (15) 10nF. They dont seem to be tied to any designators and I don't see them in the gerbers. what are they for?

thanks in advance for any help
jake

valor

Hi werbs ,
That's right. Those capacitors were not used on the Mini-Hub, and did not have any designators. Thanks for pointing it out. I've updated the BOM and pushed to github.
The BOM for the Mini-Hub should look like this now:

Best regards,
Val

valor

When hand reflowing the ICs, once the solder liquefies, it's a good idea to tap the IC (from top) very gently. The tap will squeeze the excess molten solder out and they will immediately solidify into solder balls which can be removed easily. This method helps to prevent the shorts underneath the IC package.

ShiroSaki

Great!

valor

Nice! I had to check for a second if my set was still is its place. Your build is identical 😀
Have you gotten to capturing allready?

ShiroSaki

valor Not yet. My pi’s WiFi function is not working. So I ordered a new one and have not received yet.

valor

ShiroSaki Have you tried removing the heatsink-armor from your PI? It's might be affecting your signal dramatically.

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