Last night a little after 7 pm, I got email from OSH Park that my boards were back from fab and by 9:30, email that my boards had been shipped! Fantastic news since I am hoping to get them before President’s Day so I can populate them on my day off work.

On Thursday, I got the headers I needed to use the breakout boards for the TLC59282. This morning, I finally got a chance to put them on. As it turns out, the headers I ordered aren’t quite what I wanted–they are double sided, so the pins are the same length on each side. They will still work though and were quick and easy to get soldered on:

My breakout board mounted on a breadboard

So finally I can get to prototyping and working on the software. I used the same breadboard I had when using the TLC5940 earlier because it already had a bunch of LEDs on it. Everything was good up until the point where I realized the LEDs were hooked between the chip and VCC, not the chip and GND. Took a quick look at the datasheet and then at my schematic and realized I did wrong. In my schematic, I have the common side all to GND, not VCC. At first I thought I could work around this by cutting the traces to GND and fix them to go to VCC. Then I remembered that I did a GND fill, so I don’t have just one or two traces to cut total and one new wire to VCC, but three traces for each LED and adding new wire hacks (grr–why can’t I remember the real name of these wires right now?) to each LED.

So, in other words, the boards are pretty much DOA. They aren’t completely useless. I’ll still get to use them to test the balance, make sure all the drill holes and everything else was manufactured as expected, and photograph to use as the banner for this blog. I did actually expect that this first board probably would have issues that would make it not work. I was expecting those problems to be manufacturing issues I didn’t know about though, and not my own stupid errors. As I mentioned in a previous entry, I did know I was risking this by ordering the boards by prototyping, but it’s still disappointing.

Now this post does make it sound like I’m pretty rash and impulsive, making many mistakes. Can’t argue with you there. I knew the risks though and it’s not that big of a deal–just another week or two delay. This time I’ll get everything prototyped before I order the next board.