I picked up the PCB for the 4ms SMR in a trade for one of the Per|former PCBs I had made up. It’s been sitting there for a while as it looked like a pretty daunting project, but I felt ready…
It’s a big board, with some very dense areas; there are 114 1k 0603 resistors!
I started with the biggest STM32 chip I’ve ever seen; lots of very fine pitch pins, but I drag soldered it and it worked out fine.
Then, I installed the rest of the SMD components – I did this in several sittings, over the course of about a week. I’m not sure how long it took in total, but a good few hours!
Then I flipped it over, installed the RGB LEDs and powered it up for the first time. I was very happy to see it all light up and no magic smoke.
I flashed the STM32 with the bootloader/firmware, then built up all the panel components.
I glued the light pipes into the panel with a few spots of gorilla glue.
It worked first time! This is a crazy module, capable of generating some really interesting sounds. And it’s deeeeeep! The manual is very good, so I’m off to learn how to use it…