Proof of Concept

Well I have started to sort out a design. I managed to get a sample IC sent Free from TI, I was surprised as it was sent via DHL from USA to the UK within a few days. But the bigest surprise I had was that the IC was packaged in a moisture free package. I have been in electronics for a few years now and have not come across a moisture sensitive IC, unless it was designed to measure moisture. After a bit of digging I found the reason to be the size and pitch of the IC pins. The device is a 64 pin TQFP package, this means the IC has small pins, very small. The design and production of this is going to be tough, but fun.

To speed up the development I managed to find a PCB that is used as a adapter to convert a QFP device to a standard IC pin pitch and size. Luckily the design only has a few components so fitting it all into a proof of concept should be easy enough.

The only other part missing from the concept is a connectors. Unfortunately I could not find a easy was to mount 4 HDMI sockets on the PCB, or any PCB that they could mount onto. So I did the next best thing and bought 3 HDMI extension leads and cut them up so I could solder the leads to the PCB directly. I have now found out that you do get what you pay for, the leads I bought where from Amazon, and I found out after I cut it up it was not fully wired. I was not expecting HDMI 1.4 spec but I was expecting the CEC pin to be connected. This means the concept will not have CEC, which is sort of ok for now, I will look at buying some different cables and used them to wire up the CEC part of the concept system.

Now for the job of hand soldering the 64 pin TQFP IC.....