Featured Post

Beogram Commander Remote Control: Maybe This is the Final Version!..;-)

This is a follow up to my recent post about the redesigned Beogram Commander remote control board, which now works in both (DC-motor) Beogr...

Saturday, January 10, 2015

Beogram 4002 (5513) Remote Control: Now With a Professionally Made PCB

I redesigned the circuit board for the remote control receiver that I recently built for my Beogram 4002 (5513), and had a few manufactured by a professional PCB manufacturer. The boards came today, so I had to populate one of them right away and give it a spin in the Beogram...;-). Exciting!! I always love to see a new circuit board come together.

The main design changes were to put all components on the top side to ease the assembly process, and to move the ISP port out of the way of the fixture that holds the top aluminum panel. I also removed the reset button from the design and gave the keypad connector some more room. Furthermore, the location of the header that allows to directly plug the board into the keypad socket now protrudes from the main board area. This makes it much easier to plug it in, since one can now see next to the header pins and direct them into the proper female jacks on the keypad socket. This was difficult with the prototype. Here are a couple pictures of the assembled board. Front:

and back:


The large hole is for access to the screw that holds the main PCB of the Beogram. I am planning to give the receiver a 3D printed 'tray' to fix it in place with that screw, and to insulate it from the solder points of the board below. For now, this insulation is provided by a cut from a overhead transparency taped to the bottom of the board - not too pretty, but works. After populating the board the Atmega328p microcontroller needed to be programmed. I hooked the board up to a bench supply and connected the AVRISP MkII programmer and gave it some brain:

Now it was time to install the board. Here is a photo of the board plugged into the socket of the keypad connector. The connector itself is plugged into the socket on the board. This preserves the keyboard functionality.

This looks pretty nice now!...Perfect location of the IR receiver cable, too. I am looking forward to having the printed tray. This should make it fully plug-and-play. After reinstalling the panels the Beogram functioned identical to the prototype (as recently demonstrated in this YouTube video).
Hot Beolove..;-)!!





4 comments:

  1. Holy crap, that looks nice! What would you ask for ordering this board with you?

    One question though: would it be possible to re-configure the sketch to work with different IR codes? I have a functioning Apple TV right next to my Beogram so you can understand the difficulties it would give ;)

    ReplyDelete
  2. This could be made to work with pretty much any modern remote. The Roku remote may be another candidate with useful buttons for this task. Which remote did you have in mind?

    ReplyDelete
  3. There aren't that many sleek remotes I see after some googling...
    That Roku one looks nice; I guess that one can be learnt by the Harmony as well (if desired) and it is only $10 second hand.

    Me like!

    ReplyDelete
  4. The previous (white plastic) Apple remote might be another candidate. I think it has different codes than the current Apple TV version...

    ReplyDelete

Comments and suggestions are welcome!