eagle Archives - Uri_ba's pit build blog

Caution Panel – Initial Design and soldering

I’ll start with an apology – I’ve been working on prototyping for this for over a week, And I’ve never too a video or a photo of the prototype working on the breadboard. So this post would be somewhat less illustrated then I would have wanted. sorry 🙁

I’ve decided to take the Indexer design concept and use the Shift register chip’s ability to be chained as a way to drive the Cation panel.

F-16 caution panel is made up of 4 rows of 8 lamps – classic for 8bit shift register, I just need to chain 4 of them and presto – the entire caution panel on 3 pins using SPI (CS, SCK and MOSI – where SCK and MOSI are shared among all the other devices anyway).

We’ll start by looking at the Caution panel structure itself.

DED Adventures – Part 6 – The connector conundrum

Well After working on the thing for two months, I’ve got a pretty good concept on what I want to achieve.

I started with DED and grew from there.
The first obvious “victim” was the FFI, as it’s “right there”.
followed by the Indexers (again, “they are just there”).

then I just got greedy 🙂
PFL was next to be added – because “it’s basically just another DED”, closly followed by the caution panel “it’s right next to the PFL, and the code is just a bumped up Indexer”

and then I completely lost it..
and glareshield lights and TWP lights were also included on the roadmap and also the CMDS display – because I can.

But I’m pretty sure the Arduino cannot handle all of this – at least the base would be set for floks that would prefer having TWP over caution panel or CMDS over DED/PFL.

but connecting everything is not as trivial, especially in the cockpit environment – and bread board is out of the question of course.. cables are too fiddly.

So I’ve started thinking about a PCB design to accommodate all this and make it somewhat user friendly to assemble – but still maintain some flexibility.

So that would be covered in this post.