So I am starting to appreciate the work that Ladyada has put into the Mintymp3 player, and have decided to not send her any more "suggestions" on how sweet her project could be if she used it as an educational program. I downloaded and installed PCB123 and started laying out the electronics for my minty (killing time waiting for my sampled chips to come) and became very confused. I now know pcb creation programs are like CADs only much less fun to work with, I wasted well over an hour trying to make a chip that was not in their inventory. After it was over, you would think I had learned something; but you'd be wrong. The chip I was making was the PCM17481 the DAC that Ladyada thought would be a good replacement to the CS4340. Now I think I know why she did not feel like replacing it on her board; it probably was not listed in the standard parts, and she didn't want to have to invent the wheel. Not re-invent mind you, when you are working in these worthless programs (the one she was using is infinitely worse in my opinion than the one I am using) you actually have to invent. In one place I searched for Molex and found a large number of Molex connectors 2 to 40 pin, and then when I went to create a 50 pin straight through for the CF/IDE adapter and same search yielded no hits. Whatever.
So the net result of this week was nothing actually getting done (as far as the actual lay out of the board is concerned) I was so frustrated by the program I avoided it all 12 hours I would have otherwise worked on it and listened/read Robert Jordan books. Always next weekend I suppose.
Completely not related, it looks like the Servo magazine published the results of the servo hackasapien contest (not that they bothered to update the contest page, or even point to some of the sites up for the contest) so if you cared purchase the back issues Jan and Feb.
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