I finished making the circuit board for my digital mbira today – man building circuit boards is incredibly detail-oriented. I’ve come to dread it a little bit, especially since you always try to get the most electronics in the minimum space, which ends up being so fiddly to work with. Nonetheless, this board is done! Take a look first and then I’ll describe what’s on it.
The board is built around an arduino nano which is the big blue chip on the left. The IC’s at the top are 4051 analog multiplexers, there’s one to the right of the arduino as well, which turn 5 of the arduino’s analog ins into 34. At the bottom of the board is a 10LED unit, controlled by a shift register (which isn’t put into its socket in this photo, and the shift register can only control 8 LEDs, so 2 LEDs are directly wired to the arduino). There also two pushbuttons on the top for thumb control, and two on the bottom that you can’t see for control with your middle finger.
Almost forgot the accelerometer (the red board on the right) which goes into one of the 4051′s.
So a pretty simple board, but still a lot of work to cram everything on! Tomorrow I am hopefully going to finish the phyical construction – I’ve put copper tape on the tines so I just have to wire them up. Here are the tines so far:
