Parallella Community

Hi guys,

My first post on the Parallella Community.

Had an idea and was wondering what your thoughts would be on adding a small slider or toggle switch to the J15 jumped to prevent people having to solder their board in order to make use of a clustered power supply.

I'm not experienced what so ever with soldering or components but was hoping someone on the forums might be and would be able to tell me whether this was possible and perhaps whether it could be added to the manufacturing process?

I just received two parallella boards, but also purchased the cluster kit from Ground Electronics, which in order to use I was required to solder a piece of wire across the J15 jumper in order to divert the 5V power.

I had my dad do it for me as he is experienced with soldering, but I couldn't help but feel it was a disadvantage in the sense that I was then limited to powering both the boards one particular way and could not undo the change without removing the wire and more importantly the fact that I had to solder the board and risk damaging it, making it probably near impossible to claim under warranty if I then turned on the board to find it had another issue.

I'm not particular sure on the size that would be required for a switch, but this one looks close: http://www.mouser.com/search/ProductDet ... ModA%3D%3D

Your thoughts and input would be appreciated. Apologies if this is a stupid idea, as I said, I'm not experienced in such things.

Thanks

Tim

Not that simple I'm afraid.

Several things:

- The switch is not cheap and requires manual labor since you can't place it automatically.
- The board is designed to have only connectors on two sides to ease integration. A giant switch like that would protrude quite a bit
- This jumper also allows to provide power through it ... if you put a switch, that option is gone and it's _MUCH_ harder to unsolder something that to solder it.

It never is! haha

Thanks for taking the time to reply, much appreciated.

Cheers,

Tim

I am not a good solderer either but managed to solder 4 boards for my cluster with no mishaps.

I just bought some solid core hookup wire at Radio Shack, stripped the plastic coating off and cut some small lengths and got busy doing a sloppy solder job.

Same as capnrob, I soldered the J15 pin on multiple boards so I could power them from a single source. I had the thought of incorporating a button or a switch to do a hard reset on just one board rather than having to reset the whole cluster, but then it occurred to me that resetting just a single board will dump the extra current used by that board on the rest of the boards in the cluster, and while that might not affect them all too much, I didn't want to take the chance of causing damage. Soldering a small jumper proved to be fairly simple anyways.

So my dad is way smarter than me and suggested adding two pins and a jumper shunt so that I could easily remove one board from my cluster and switch it back to using the default power supply.

If the board came with 2 pins in J15, would mean someone simply just has to add the jumped shunt (or remove it so it could just come with the board) to enable the alternate power route.

It would probably be a bit harder with the 1601 board because there is a Samtec connector underneath the J15, but for the 1600 it works great.

Again the main purpose would be to stop people having to solder their board and risk voiding the warranty.

board.png (991.04 KiB) Viewed 16387 times