Optoisolator and Sanguino Built

After quite a few hours of soldering, I have finished the opto-isolator board assembly. Well, I'll call it v1.0. I hope to make a much nicer one using my mill to cut a proper PCB. I've used a Radio Shack "PCB" that is arranged much like a bread board. Here is my layout design:

I did this in Inkscape. I have the free version of Eagle but don't know how to use it. I've also messed with Fritzing a bit. I went with Inkscape because I know it pretty well and I wasn't really designing a PCB but just trying to figure out how to put it all together. I marked places where I needed to cut the traces and where I would be putting headers and whatnot.

Here it is fully assembled:

I had a lot of confidence in my soldering going into this. I found it a bit more challenging than the boards I had purchased and assembled. I think the through-hole PCBs wick the solder in better. These boards with copper on one side are a little harder to get the solder to attach to. So the back side isn't that pretty. And it sure did a long time to put all the wires in. A tool path generator for milling PCBs will be really sweet. I'll redesign this thing at a later date.

I've been using a Modern Device Bare Bones Board (BBB) Arduino clone for my experimentation up until now. It's a good little board, but I knew I was going to need more pins. And more memory would probably be pretty nice, too. So I sprung for a Sanguino. This thing has 32 I/O pins and 64K of memory.  It's like an aircraft carrier compared to the BBB. I guess that makes the BBB something like a class C frigate or something. I put that together in 2 sessions, maybe a couple hours. I do manage to take my time with this sort of thing. Really I can't believe I can do it at all. Modern Device also makes a little USB to serial converter since the Sanguino doesn't include USB. The BBB doesn't either which is great for an embedded microcontroller, but this will be connected to the computer most of the time.

Anyway, here it is:

I've got the output wires going to a proto board for testing with some LEDs for identifying which Sanguino pins ended up going to which output lines (I deviated from the plans so as to produce the best wire runs.) I uploaded Bitlash to the Sanguino to make it super easy to turn the LEDs on and off.

The next step is to wire in the stepper driver. I've got a simple ribbon cable that I'll just solder directly into the opto PCB. In v2.0 I'll put in some nice inter-connectors. Also I'll wire in the arcade throttle control. Then it's time to write some software!