Good evening everyone! I hope you are well.

Schematic Updates

I'd like to thank everyone for their participation so far in the course. We appear to have attracted some seasoned professionals to the course who have spotted a few mistakes in the schematic or course content. They have been awarded the Eagle Eye Award for their contributions. EagleEyeAward (If I missed anyone, please ping me)

Consequently, we have a new schematic in the "Design Files" portion of the "Defining the Project" section. Some changes were stylistic, while others solved problems. For example, an oversight left the Real-Time-Clock's (RTC) Multi-function pin disconnected from the ATMega. This wouldn't have prevented the badge from functioning, but it would have prevented the alarm function of the RTC from working. Here's a brief rundown

Header J101 has been eliminated and two GPIO pins assigned to the header are now connected to the IMU and the RTC interrupt. The two remaining analog inputs are being abandoned.
An unintentional voltage divider has been removed.
A potential logic-level shifting issue has been identified.
If you hop into the Question and Answer Forum, you will see all the issues brought up today.

Zoom Webinar on inspectAR Tuesday at 11:00 Pacific

One of our course sponsors, inspectAR will host a webinar for students & faculty tomorrow on how to use inspectAR for distance learning. The webinar is free, as are licenses for students & faculty. There are still spots available -- so feel free to share this with anyone you know in the educational arena who you think might be interested.

https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_d0N3EHPqQre9EP0OXoF05Q

Raffle / Lottery

As promised -- here is a list of usernames who have been tentatively selected to have their boards manufactured and assembled for free. As stated from the beginning, to even enter the raffle, you have to live in North America (Canada, U.S., Mexico). However, there are a few catches. First, this isn't a blank check. You can't have them made anywhere. The boards are going to be manufactured by Royal Circuits and assembled and shipped by Advanced Assembly, in Aurora, Colorado. You might be on the hook for shipping costs, I'm not sure yet. Additionally, your board must be ready to manufacture (pass DFM and DFA with no holds) at the time we do the group order, or you will forfeit your spot to someone who has a board ready to go.

To select these names, I manually selected all participants with North American state names and put them into a list named "data" in Mathematica. Then I used "RandomSample[data, 50] // Sort" to pick the names. If you see your username here and I selected it by accident, please let me know and I'll open up a slot for someone who is eligible.

{abec, adityam, alant, austind, bertrands, carlosr, charlies, colinm, coreym, craigw, dallasl, davidd, derekg, drewp, ericb, ericj, erikm, estebanm, evand, gabrielk, garrettg, ianr, ianv, indridx, jesser, johny, katrinac, kingm, manuelo, mattk, matts, mitchm, mubinas, nardeva, nicoled, oyekanmio, parthp, pauld, phild, pranavi, pratikk, prayagd, robertc, russelld, sidp, stever, sujitha, todds, toddt, zacb}

Oscilloscope / Altium License Still Available!

Don't get too discouraged if you missed out on the free board -- there is still time to get promoted to that list. And, the oscilloscope and 1-year Altium License are still up for grabs! But they are not going to be made available until the end of the course when we all take part in a brief design contest. At the end, Bob and I will issue a challenge, and any interested participants will have to come up with an idea-only solution (we won't ask you to actually design the circuit to support your idea, since that will certainly take more than 2-4 hours).

Have a great night everyone! I won't send you another bulk email for a few days! See you in the forums!