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One thing, even though the Dell case is big, I ended up losing the last motherboard PCIe slot as I did not want to rework the case back slots to move it over one to be able to use all the motherboard slots. Which is okay since I did not plan on using that one anyway.

Yeah this is the issue I warn people about when selecting a case. It's not enough to just fit versus the motherboard physical dimensions, it has to fit when the board is inserted and aligned against the expansion slot apertures in the case.

Great work Andy, now works a treat with my tablet !

Great news Barry and thanks a lot for working with me to get this sorted out.

what would be nice if you can do it, a spare output on ATMega8L to go high when cooling stage starts. I want to try drive a cooling fan.

Interesting... due to flash space issues it would have to be a single GPIO that goes high during the final reflow stage (the cool down). Pins 6 and 26 are currently available for use.

Looking to the future,  I think I'll be doing a 'version 2' board at some point that will include an extra transformer footprint for US users on a 120VAC supply. I'll also upgrade the MCU to the venerable 328p seen in the Arduino Uno which will give me more flash space to include a PWM fan output that would be driven at a duty cycle matching the degree of cooling required. That won't be until much later this year though.

Mike, have you checked that the raid chipset supports 3TB drives? It might be limited to 2TB.

I admit it can be misleading. I refer in the documentation to the bit positions within a 4-bit word D0, D1, D2, D3. They are then physically connected to the high 4 pins of the LCD data bus. I could certainly improve the documentation to be more clear about that.

Hi, welcome to the forum.

I can see two mistakes in the wiring that are the cause of the issue.

Most important is that your data lines are connected to the LCD DB0..DB3. When running in 4-bit mode it is the high 4 bits, DB4..DB7, of the LCD data bus that connect to D0..D3. Change your wiring like this:

PA2 (D0) => LCD DB4
PA3 (D1) => LCD DB5
PA4 (D2) => LCD DB6
PA5 (D3) => LCD DB7

The other thing is that your contrast might be at such a level that you cannot see any characters. It's best to connect it (pin #3, Ve) through a 10K pot to ground. You can then turn the pot to the ideal position for viewing the display, measure the resistance and then put a fixed value resistor in its place.

Your code works without any modifications but make sure that your linker.ld file is set for a flash memory size of 64kb to match your MCU. Here's a photo of me running your code.

Barry, I've created a new release of both the app and the ATMega8L firmware. You should get an update notification from Google shortly that will prompt you to upgrade. A few minor bugs are fixed that may not be relevant to your specific issue but you should take the update anyway. If you can't wait for google then the .apk in github is the new version.

The ATMega8L firmware is pushed to github and available now. The major change is that the firmware will now continually display the oven duty cycle whilst the android app is connected. This means that you can run a reflow from the app and compare the duty cycle displayed in the app with that displayed by the firmware. The values should be almost in sync with the firmware lagging by about half a second.

Hi Mike and welcome to the forum. The CPU/memory configuration that you've bought pretty much mirrors my own setup and I'm sure you won't be disappointed with the performance that's for sure. I guess you already know the dimensions of the Z800 board and given your previous experience with modding I'm sure that you'll just make it work whatever it takes. I checked out your photo build log of the two-tone green/blue case and it's amazing, so much attention to detail and to getting the professional finish.

Let's wait and see if it's OK with the Android phone. I've used it with the Irulu X1s (that's the cheap one in the photograph in the article), a Nexus 10, a Samsung S4 and an HTC One M8.

One thing that I can do is to slow down the update rate in case what I'm using is too fast for you. Currently the app will poll for the last temperature reading and/or set a new target temperature every 300ms and the firmware will poll the sensor for a new reading every 200ms. I will relax those two settings and produce a test build for you to try at the weekend.

I've generated an android app with the polling rate reduced to 1000ms. You can download it here. It can be side-loaded on to an android device. I'd be interested to know if this helps you.

A few points noted when using display and switch operation:
1]   The oven will now reflow without manually preventing large overshoots; however the profile    seems to be different. I have no separate temp logging so cannot show you results but here    are so figures from display:

   0    to    90  secs   ramps up to 115c
   90    to    180 secs    holds at 115c
   180    to    216 secs    ramps to 195c
   216    to    240 secs   reflow with 220c max.

This is now fixed and pushed to github (see issue #1)

5]   When time display reaches 3 figures, demand temp display is over written.

I cannot reproduce this. When I tested it while fixing the tracking issue the status line at the bottom of the display was always correctly formatted.

In reference to a earlier post by Andy i believe i must be one of the lucky ones with 6 core processors. i bought a revision 001 board but luckily
for me the previous owner had updated the bios to V 3.54 and the Boot Block date was set to 11/10/09. I initially put two Xeon X5570's in to
test everything was working ok. I now have 2 x Xeon X5660's running with no problems at all. just thought i would share this with you all.

An 001 board with a new bootblock has not been heard of before. You are very lucky to have one. Next time you have the case open would you mind having a close look at the BIOS IC to see if there are any signs of rework? It would be interesting to know if it's been physically upgraded.

I've recently been engaged in writing the firmware for a USB HID device on the F042 and naturally I didn't want to use the bloated HAL/Cube libraries so I implemented an efficient stm32plus driver for custom HID devices and included a new stm32plus example to support it.

I wrote a blog post to support the driver and the example and padded it out with, hopefully, all the information that you need to write and debug STM32 F042 USB devices connected to a PC.

Did you make any progress on this? I'm up for making the mod to my old v2 board.

Sorry for the late reply, I've been away for a couple of weeks. For the CPU score I get 1531 with 2x X5680. Hyperthreading is enabled in the BIOS.

Hi Peter,

Controlling multiple displays over I2C is feasible if you can change their addresses so there's no clash on the I2C bus. The main drawback though is going to be performance. At the resolutions you're quoting the update rate is going to be very poor indeed - think several seconds per screen refresh.

Have you considered an embedded Android tablet for the display? The screens can be very bright and high quality and you can talk between your PI and the tablet with bluetooth. Plus you get the whole android graphics accelerated infrastructure available to develop a cool interface.

- Andy