Well, I'm still working on the damn digital Medal. I have one fully working. It looks great actually. (I'd post a pic but I can't find my camera) But of course, we are going to change the design. The board is just not stable. I had one that worked great after construction but then it failed a couple of days later. It improved a lot with a alcohol bath. So at least part of my problem is just dust and debris. I need to buy flux cleaner so I can clean these boards too.
However, my ability to experiment further is limited because I have no good boards left. Basically i can try to repair one malfunctioning board. I will do that, but it won't bring me the confidence that I truly know what is going on with the boards. I am NOT going to order more boards. At $95/five they are just too expensive.
Anyway, another problem with the board is that it is expensive. The massive number of pins required on the MCU means that a ATmega32 is required. However, the MCU can't drive the LED matrix directly so driver chips are required. Some of the members rounded up some driver chips that take a serial input and can be cascaded. This means that the MCU now only needs three pins instead of 22. So we can go from an ATmega32 to an ATtiny45. Its a pretty big savings.
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