[sdiy] Re: Digi-Mod [was: source for many, small, simple PCB's ?? for educational use]

[Eric Brombaugh]

On Mar 3, 2009, at 7:38 PM, Seb Francis wrote:

> Incidentally I just tonight finished getting my head around setting  
> up all the peripherals of the dsPIC in my DigiMod board, and I'm  
> happy to say that all parts of the PCB are functioning perfectly.   
> My only small screw-up with the design was getting a couple of the  
> resistor values wrong in the feedback return VCA stage.  Nothing  
> that a couple of seconds with a soldering iron didn't fix.  I've  
> discovered also that the THAT VCAs have a lovely warm/soft  
> distortion when over-driven, so a perfect input stage before the ADC.

Great news!

> Now I just hope I can get all the software written and functioning  
> before I run out of flash write-cycles ... 100 cycle min  / 1000  
> cycle typ. endurance is kind of low - much lower than older dsPICs.   
> The only thing that gives me some hope is that this is spec'ed over  
> -40 to 85C, so perhaps at 20-30C one can get a lot more cycles?

Cross my fingers - I have been using the same board / chip for  
development on a couple of different projects and haven't run out of  
flash cycles yet. I'd guess I'm probably in the 200-300 cycles range  
and it's still working fine.

Eric