End of summer blues

So, end of summer is approaching. Didn't' achieve anything I planned this summer. Moving home obviously didn't help. 

*Rant warning*

Promised myself I wouldn't rant on here too much, but suffice to say my job sucks. Our competitors products are twice the volume of ours, for good reason, but when you've been getting away with something for a long time.... Too much said already. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but any of my previous jobs would be much much better in every possible regard. If anyone wants to employ an experienced and competent electronics engineer, with 9 years industrial/commercial experience and 25 odd years hobby experience, I did start when I was 8 or so, then contact me. Pretty easy to find on Linkedin, one of the first UK results to appear. I am happy to give anything a go, and pretty good at stuff I haven't done before as well, can hit the ground running as you might say. 

*End of rant*

Back to the topic of OHDSP, I am almost done with some layout and component changes on a lot of boards. A new 8 channel AK4458 DAC design is complete as well. I have reworked my XMOS based board, the last one had everything and the kitchen sink, and all components on the top side. I thought (or hoped) it might be something I could develop and sell in products/as a product. However after destroying two £15 XMOS micro-controllers, and moving, that was shelved for a while. I am not doing this for money so I reverted to a design similar to the existing ones. Less practical for mass production, but that doesn't matter.

The new XMOS design is still cramped, and I have tried numerous layouts on a 10cm x 10cm board, it's not ideal (no PCB ever is!) but it's not terrible. Just deciding on the ground connections to the exposed pad. I will probably buy a hot air station. My ADAU1452 DSP board has solid connections, or I thought it did, to ground and that worked fine. I think the issue is that I used low temperature solder paste, just with a standard soldering iron, to get the centre pad started and I didn't do that with the XMOS chips. But it was several years ago I last built an ADAU1452 board.

Actually on the ADAU1452 (1451, 1450) board the ADAU1466 and ADAU1462 parts are compatible as well, so I have added these part numbers in the new design, although they should work fine on the existing boards, but this is not tested. 

I am also working on some other PCB layouts, not related to this. I really want some nice "big" amplifiers. I have a pair of B&W CM10 from previously working there, and even my homebuilt speakers, and they both could do with a bit more than 40W-50W sticking up them. Some of the older Yamaha (MX-800, MX-1000, MX-1) amplifier look interesting, with service manuals online, but eBay purchases always work out badly for me. Also there is the SC480 and Studio 350 from Silicon Chip that look like good, high performance, simple designs. Similar to the old Cyrus One/Two, which I really like, in design. I have been playing with layouts for all of these - for personal use only - so that has been taking up time. You can never have too much power 😊