Hello everyone,

it’s time for the promised update! The last weeks I was working on the system quite a lot. This is what was done…

I received the revision B prototype-boards but had the great “luck” that my order had some production failures and 2 of the 3 boards had random shorts between the different signal and buses (this is the reason for the wires you can see on the pictures). The (free) 2nd run is finally produced and will arrive here within the next couple of days.

I already can tell though, that there will be a 3rd revision of the boards as I want them to be perfect and also received some last-minute ideas which I just have to include! One of them is to add DIP-switches to the motors-driver-board so that one can set the motor-mode easily from 1/8 step to all the way up to full-step.

The other big part of my development work was the implementation of core parts of the software. The basic UI-engine is implemented and running to my satisfaction. I guess I found a good way to realize a smooth user-input-system with just 2 buttons and a rotary encoder. I really like the encoder input and still can use on more button and then there is the touch-input which will be implemented for later versions greater than 2.0.

Here is a picture of the settings menu with 4 of the 5 so far existing menu points fully implemented (the ones that show data on the right side):

when pressing the “edit” button one will see a new screen, dedicated to the selected setting. This screen will contain some basic explanations about what the setting is all about. This way a basic help will be included.

Here is how the main screen will look like (sort of) – this screen will show all the data that is relevant to the actual shoot. The data is still missing but I hope you get a feeling for how it will look like:

As you can see, I added a functionality to read the input voltage and thus display some battery information. This is self-calibrating and will show perfect values after one full battery-cycle (After the system knows the values for fully charged and fully empty). Another feature which I always wanted was the support for color schemes. Here is a picture with the “night-vision” scheme activated.

I hope you like it!

Cheers,
Airic