Rear Logic Electronics

I started working on my rear logic boards. I got this board from Leon B, in Belgium and really lucked out in him having some on hand. No waiting! I really don't need this board for my current droid build since R5 doesn't use it, but the plan is to have swappable (sp?) droid heads to switch back and forth at some point.

Here is the page of Leon's that has his tutorial: Back Logic Display Tutorial

Couple of things I noticed, he doesn't really provide alot of documentation about what resistors you should use when actually completing the board. After quite a bit of searching and rereading the R2Builders message boards I determined that they should be 3.3KOhm. It's been twenty years since I memorized the resistor color codes so some simple lookups on the web were in order. The color codes on this are Orange, Orange, Red, Gold.

I've got hundreds of resistors in my electronics junk drawer and wouldn't you know it, not a single 3.3k ohm resistor in the bunch. So I'll stop by a radio shack on the way to work.

I didn't use a bezel to align my LED's but just freehanded everything. I wasn't to concerned over it since I intended to use fiber to a bezel and didn't need a perfect alignment. Either way they ended up nice in my opinion. The finished LED part seems nice. I really liked Leon's pcb board. Very tight, and fairly easy to work with.

I did actually start to use a bezel that I had laying around from the A&A skins. Unfortunately I seemed to be one row short but it did give me and idea on how to align them nicely.

Digging about in the same drawer with the resistors I located an old hdd cable. I very carefully cut off a ribbon to use to connect it to the PIC flasher. I haven't connected it yet, I'll do that once the resistors are in place.

If you are using the PIC flasher from Carl's electronics, do not include the resistors on that board. I built the PIC flasher a long time ago and just added them automatically. As you can see the on the PIC flasher on the right, the resistors need to come out. Unfortunately, I think this flasher has a bad chip which apparantly they have been notoriously sent out with. I'll be contacting Carl's to ask for a replacement.

Total time for this buildout was something along the lines of 3.5 hours.

Heres the links to additional information :

• Graphical Resistance Calculator
• Back Logic Display Tutorial (ordering information is here as well.)
• PIC LED Flasher Part CK1007
• Soldering Work Station - If you don't already have one I picked up this inexpensive dual power station from radio shack and really recommend it for a low-cost solution.