It all about RGB LED

5 months ago, our lecturer encouraged us to start our final year project by learning mirco controller aka the brain of a robot.


To learn how to use it, we can buy a Rm150 development board BVkits from a sale office in Penang. However, it was no more in sales.

bvkits.

Apparently another company, Cytron

( a very innovative local company in my humble opinion, shld be good to work in the future) has the same thing too, sold for about Rm130 including postage fee. Hey it's cheaper, but wasn't sure about how the board works, so didn't ordered it.


Instead, I thought of a making/copying/clone the board by myself!If successful, I might make some $$$$ (note, I expected 4 digit profit) out of that. So I got a BVkits board from my lecturer and started to my journey of becoming rich!

Just follow 3 steps
1. decipher the board
2. draw the schematic and convert it into PCB
3.manufacture it

Simple??

Step 1,decipher it.
What decipher?!?!

The board is green, with all the electrical route spreading all over it, like a computer board, just not so complicated and my task was to turn those electrical route to simple, understandable schematic drawing, as shown below.



Step 2, draw the schematic in a PCB ( those green electrical board are called PCB, printed-circuit-board) software. Wait! I don't have any software to do that.


Thanks to google, and after much search, I ended up with 2 software, Altium and eagle. Altium cost about 2k USD per year, but I used the 1 month-trial version and aimed to fisnish this whole thing in 1 month. yeah too ambitious, the software is too hi tech for me.
Then comes eagle, it's free for life, but the board size is restricted. That's a major problem, cause I cant fit the whole circuit.

the Printed Circuit Board

Hence I was stucked at step 2 for 4 months. Actually, while making the board for PIC I don;t know why are these component connected in such manner, whats the function? why we have different designs..... I have tonnes of questions without answers....

Until I found the super cool US company Sprakfun
It's website has the best tutorials I've seen so far about micro controller. They start teaching form the ground zero and slowly progress up , and they make $$ by selling those tutorial materials on their website. Thanks to this website, I've found all my answers, and I realised I don't need to make one of those board to learn PIC!! HOORAY!!!

Can I say that all my previous effort was dumped into the sea? I don't think so, because we humans learn from failures! Now I really have the feeling of 皇天不负有心人！！！ ( sorry no English translation for this).



I don't think I am going to get a part time job now, cause I'll be the CEO of my new founded company --- Secky Electronics SDN BHD.

IPO will be on 31/8/09, share will be priced at 25 sen each, total units to be released 1000units.
So wanna invest in ME?

shift loader

Oh ya, what's the relation of the title "It all about RGB LED" and its content which is" all about PIC" ? Well, I was searching information on driving a RGB LED ( red green blue light emitting diode), and that's how I found the superb Sparkfun website!!