assembling a few more OtterCam-s3‘s today.

[janamarie@mystical.garden]

assembling a few more OtterCam-s3‘s today. Haven’t soldered a BGA in a while, so wish me luck

this shouldn’t be too hard though, it’s a pretty coarse pitch and my technique should still work pretty well

[scy@chaos.social]

@janamarie MicroSD slot says owo :3

[janamarie@mystical.garden]

two lovely beings recently started working on the firmware again, we now have a bare Debian Linux running on it, 'just' missing the image sensor driver and the mipi to encoder to USB/Ethernet stream pipeline… how ward can it be, right? we have been working on this since *checks the note on the pcb* 2021..

[janamarie@mystical.garden]

@scy uwu

[janamarie@mystical.garden]

this board is somewhat of a nightmare fuel to networks people, please note the ethernet decoupling.. ~ :3c

[janamarie@mystical.garden]

I got this board assembled from JLCPCB, but a lot of components are still missing. This is mostly due to this board being one of the very early boards running through their PCBA process! I actually wrote on their blog about how the PCBA process works at the time, they allowed me to test it very early :3

[nblr@chaos.social]

@janamarie Nice „zero parts“ strain relief slot in the pcb and „why shouldn’t I rotate that part 45°“-technique ️

[kouett@soc.kouett.net.eu.org]

@janamarie where... where is the big chonky transformer??? :s

[janamarie@mystical.garden]

@kouett there are 4 big capacitors~ :3c

[janamarie@mystical.garden]

@nblr if I ever redo this, I will not allow myself any 90° or 45° rotated parts

[kouett@soc.kouett.net.eu.org]

@janamarie I'm not feeling very well

[janamarie@mystical.garden]

@domi @evey @kouett both, low in space, meaning I would have had to choose highly integrated receptacles, which would have driven up the boards price. Note that this thing costs about 15€ to assemble..

[domi@donotsta.re]

@janamarie@mystical.garden @evey@chaos.social @kouett@soc.kouett.net.eu.org oh! i expected around 2x as much, this is nice

[janamarie@mystical.garden]

@domi @evey @kouett I should add, they can be replaced with 0 Ohm resistors and there is an additional row beneath the receptacle to replace it with a 2.0mm pin header to move it to a second board. The pin-header also would allow for PoE, I planned for this already!

[janamarie@mystical.garden]

@domi @evey @kouett this is actually not even my original idea, the first version of the OtterCam is not the OtterCam-s3, but the OtterCam-z7, featuring a Zynq-7020 instead of the Allwinner-s3. I have had a schematic of that since 2020, started it in altium, moved to kicad, redid the schematic twice, once with a Zynq-7015, then the 7020 again with more modern parts in 2024/2025, couldn't bring myself to design the board in the end because I just couldn't afford it at the time and now here we are, the OtterCam-z7 will still happen, maybe soon even, but I kind of want to get the OtterCam-s3 to spit out an image first..

Weirdly enough, the z7 would probably have been a bit easier for me alone, I can use Vivado and write gateware, but I really am not good at doing embedded linux and V4L shenanigans

[janamarie@mystical.garden]

@domi @evey @kouett the OtterCam-z7 will be much more expensive :S

[janamarie@mystical.garden]

clearance..

[atna@eldritch.cafe]

@janamarie does it make alignment easier?

[palmandneedle@norden.social]

@janamarie ...is clearance, Clarence! If #BlondiHacks taught me anything

And dont call me Shirley

[janamarie@mystical.garden]

it boots!!! Soldering the BGA was much more trivial than anticipated, the QFN in the lower left corner was certainly worse…

next up: I think I will do at least a second board and uh, the sensor board, which contains the 'spicy BGA', the image sensor. It’s in theory as easy to solder, but it’s also a rather fragile part, one entire face must not be touched too much