Sanguinololu 1.3a - Part 1: Build

See Also:
Part 2 -  Trouble in Paradise
Part 3 - Not Out of the Woods Yet

I've been playing with electronics a bit lately. I've built a bench power supply and an ESR Meter.

I make a case for the Power supply out of an old atx psu case, but haven't found a good one for the ESR meter.

Then I found the RepRap. Of Course! Why buy a box for $5 when I could build a machine that would print me one for just $500? So it was settled.

Oh yea, my brother is building a cnc machine and after the tedious job of wiring up those two projects a cnc pcb router seemed like a really good idea. I'm not sure if the reprap frame is sturdy enough for what I have in mind, but I'm going to build something along that line. Of course the most fun part of the whole project is the electronics. After looking around a bit I decided to build a Sanguinololu to control the machine.

I bought bare PCB's, and assembled pololu (stepstick) boards from ebay, all the components from Mouser (BOM from the Sanguinololu page)

The FTDI Chip Installed:

The USB jack and related Components:

The Pololu Headers, decoupling Caps, etc:

I'm really bad about taking pictures, I am improving, but at this point I got busy and stopped taking pictures, so we skip way ahead to the completed board:

The Pololu Drivers arrived the today:

The Pololu drivers came with tiny heatsinks, here is the completed board, drivers and all:

I did one Sanguinololu for my brother and one for me, the first took about 6hrs, the second about 2. I had some trouble and I'll cover that in another post.
Steve