Quote from: BkkCoins on June 23, 2013, 04:04:57 AM

Quote from: ryepdx on June 23, 2013, 03:47:07 AM

Quote from: ecliptic on June 23, 2013, 03:26:11 AM

If it's a standard 0402 cap, if one specific manufacturer part on one vendor runs low or out, there are 5-10x other vendors with the same part, and probably another 10x manufactuer parts (each listed on the vendor sites) that will work

Derp. Thanks. I feel a bit silly now. :-p

In the case of caps and resistors I put part #s mostly just as example. For the most part I didn't select specific ones based on extended criteria, other than sometimes choosing low ESR, or appropriate voltage rating. The inductors tend to be more specific since the DCR is directly linked to efficiency. The ICs obviously tend to be very specific, though maybe some parts have second sources that would work.

Quote from: chaoztc on June 23, 2013, 03:19:36 AM

some updates from the i2c front (a little bit technical):
...
I will forward the i2c code now to bkkcoins.

Thanks! Awesome.

Quote from: fasmax on June 23, 2013, 03:26:42 AM

Nice! where does the serial number come from?

Each PIC is programmed with a serial#. This can be automated with the Microchip Hexmate utility. Since there will be multiple vendors I'd suggest something like taking the high 8 bits as a vendor id and maybe I'll keep a register so that serial # ranges don't overlap. The only real use of the serial# is so that I2C slave arbitration is ensured that any slave has a priority when enumerating so that each one gets a unique address.

Question: Is the PIC firmware flashing possible at runtime? I.e. using the USB connector? Or would it require un-soddering the PIC and hooking it to a programmer? The reason to ask is i would ideally like to be able to change the serial# to include information about the boards position in the cluster.