Testing the boards

Post date: Dec 17, 2014 10:46:16 PM

After I completed the 12 cathode control boards, I needed to test them to be sure they work. Otherwise, I would be driven crazy if a problem arose because the problem could be caused by anything. Also, it is much easier to debug in the smaller isolated system. So to test them, I needed to connect wires to the perf boards, which can really only be done effectively by soldering. But I didn't want to solder testing wired directly to the board, so I used pin headers which enabled me to push the perf boards directly into a solderless breadboard on which I wired the testing circuit. Then I dragged a test LED across the outputs to be sure it worked. Only one of the outputs out of all 192 did not work, so I fixed it by replacing the faulty shift register with a new one. Pictured below is the testing setup with the test LED resting on one of the outputs.

-Jeremy