RPN Scientific Calculator: Hardware

In the last two months I have made a lot of progress with my calculator. The software is now finished. As well as cleaning up a few bugs I also added a battery meter to the settings page. There was enough memory on the external RAM for two separate stacks with 200 levels each. All of the code is now on a GitHub page: https://github.com/druzyek/RPN_Calculator.

For the hardware I soldered everything on to perfboard. It didn't power up the first time I plugged it in but after fixing one power connection everything started up and worked fine. Here is a picture:

For the power supply I am using 4xAA batteries with an LM1117 adjustable regulator. My local shop didn't have the resistors I needed to get 3.6v from the regulator so it is running closer to 3.5v. On the left side you can see female headers for the keyboard outputs to be plugged into and on the lower left a repurposed DIP socket for the LCD and keyboard inputs to be plugged into. The red, white, and blue wires were the smallest single strand gauge one store had and worked fairly well. When I ran out of that I switched to an even smaller gauge (the brown wires) I got form another store and it was even more convenient. It works so much better than breadboard wire and I definitely plan to use it again. If you look closely you will see two pins for power so that the whole board can be powered from the LaunchPad if needed. Each MSP430 also has its own set of programming pins so that they can be programmed in circuit. One strange thing I noticed on this project is that solder will sometimes spill through the holes and onto the other side of the board. This may be because the smaller gauge wire lets the solder through more easily. One problem I had while testing the connections were two adjacent socket pins that seemed to be bridged, even after desoldering everything around them. After removing the socket itself, I saw that a drop of solder had flowed to the other side of the board and shorted the two legs in the space between the board and the socket.

Here is everything connected and running:

 Here is a circuit schematic of the whole system:

For the case I soldered together some clad which I was able to get really cheaply. It feels pretty solid. It needs a coat of paint and I need to adjust the holes in the faceplate for the keyboard and screen. Here is what it looks like so far:

As was my goal, I submitted the project to the Project of the Month Competition at 43oh.com. Thankfully it was extended an extra month so I had some time to finish most of what I wanted to finish. Voting starts tomorrow!