Re-V

Just a quick note to myself to say that I re-completed the hardware... transplanted the contact sheet from another board without major incidents.  I really fried the perfboard where the 20-pin ribbon connector attached...through desoldering the old and resoldering the new.... and I broke the ends of a couple wires from the shift registers bending them into place, switching a couple of the wires in the process... but a quick edit to the duino sketch put everything back in order.

Another "doh!" here.... I had no experience with these ribbon connectors, so I was afraid to mess with them too much.  After I desoldered the old one from my perfboard circuit and while moving the new one from the other board, I realized that the ribbons slide in and out of the connectors quite easily. The big DOH! was that I could have simple left the 20-pin connector from the other board and just switched out the ribbons much more quickly, easily and without the heightened danger of screwing up what was working.

Despite that big miss, I removed the ribbons while I was soldering the connector to the board, so I wouldn't melt the new contact sheets in the process.  I also applied a little hot glue to the connector to hold it in place while upside down when soldering, which made it easier and may have been necessary since I desoldered most of the solder pads along with the solder, so I couldn't really solder the pins securely in place by solder alone.

Oh, almost forgot... I also used the speaker from the new board, which is much smaller than the other.  Instead of soldering the connecting wires, I twisted and taped them.  I also taped the speaker itself into the cavity since it is too small to be held into place by the screws for the factory speaker.

Whatever I did and however I did it, it worked well enough - at least for now.  The board passed regression testing with my serial test python script and then passed some spot-checked dart hits after closing everything up in the case.

I put some black electrical tape around the button holes out of which the LEDs emerge.  This looks a little cleaner and hopefully will protect the perf board from some dust and maybe any stray darts --- although I'd like to find something else to cover the LEDs for dart protection.  I also printed some small labels for the LEDs and a big label for the big window in the middle.  I might revisit these for aesthetic reasons -- I was happy just to get them almost lined up on the label sheets using Open Office Writer.

I hung the thing on my wall with a couple screws and started another test python script using some pygame menu code I found.  I checked it all in to git and am updating the pi as I type so I will port it over and take it for a test run.  Maybe I'll try to make a vid and start a dumb you tube channel as a companion to my dumb blog.

I have some more pics to post here and I still need to update the circuit diagrams to reflect the current circuit and duino sketch.  But, hey, I REALLY finished the hardware... something I wasn't sure I could pull off.  I know I can handle the software, so "Woo Hoo."