Dotty: Building v0.04 are we done ?

This weekend finally the new backboard and panel arrived. Been waiting for these whole week. Could not wait to start building it in the hope I finalized all mistakes. I didn’t make a new front pcb cause I think everything is correct on that one.

(I can reveal that Dotty is working and in a phase where I’m looking for Beta Testers. Got 3 PCB’s left so if you are interested, contact me.)

I started of placing all the resistors. There are a lot of 10K to be soldered and only 2 100K ones. Then the capacitors and sockets.

Then the transistors, power header, big capacitors and board headers. Pull the front of the old Dotty and put it on the new backboards.

All seem to fit nicely. Time to put on the part I’ve been waiting for, the panel.

At first glance it seems to fit. But there are some minor issues.

  • There is a little bit of stress on the panel from the output jacks. The holes or the jacks need about 0.1mm movement to the right.
  • The holes for the led matrix don’t line up. These needs some width and movement. Especially on the left/menu matrix.
  • The panel could use a small hole for a screw to hole it done a bit better on the left bottom side.
  • When tightening the nuts I found my biggest problem. The buttons I’ve been using seem a little bit to high. (Why didn’t I discover this earlier… oh man….)

Here you see the panel is bending and pressing onto the buttons. The Clock menu button seems to have difficulty to get back in the upwards position. But not thinning the nuts to much seems to have this solved.

There might be a solution for my problem. Just use the same button Migueldetool did on the Tarbelming. These are a bit shorter and do fit the caps. But sadly these also come in a different footprint. So these will not fit the front board.

So all in all the panel has some minor issues and the front board needs new buttons. And I have to keep them both align while doing these updates.

In the mean time I hope to get some work done on the documentation and code. And play with the new Dotty cause with all these issue it’s still a working prototype. And it fits the panel (nearly). Playable and testable.

So got three boards with these issues but if you want to build one and play with it to, contact me. I’m look for beta tester to give me some feedback.

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