Hey Folks! The final revision (fingers crossed) of the Mugsy PCB is in production and will be here in 4-7 days. I’m extremely excited with how it turned out!

Mugsy’s wiring is now 100% plug and play, and accessing the full power of the PI and microcontroller has been greatly simplified for easy hacking/experiments/development.

Below are some renders/pics, with some quick high level info after that.

PCB Renders:

PCB Details

• There are JST-XH connections for the relay board, weight sensors, water spout servo, cone stepper, RGB LED lighting, 2x Temp Sensors, water pumps, and RFID reader.

• The Pi connects through a standard 40 pin ribbon cable and 100% of the Pi pins are exposed in a second pin run for easy access/hacking.

• The “Nano” style microcontroller (Atmel 328p) is removable. There is also an additional pin run that exposes 8 of the Nano’s pins for easy access/hacking.

• The boards are now using DRV8825 stepper controllers for the cone motor instead of the LN298N. We only need one for the cone motor, so the second one is free to use for add-ons and experiments. The water pumps are still using an LN298N. This may change in the future, but for now it makes sense. I’ll go into some more detail on why this change was made in this weekend’s update.

• There are both 5V/14V input and output terminals to power other hardware.

• Eagle schematic and board files will be released once these land and pass some quick tests.

• This current fabrication batch has a total of 20 PCBs in it.

• PCB is a 2-layer board.

• I already see some labeling I need to update, but those types of incremental changes should not be considered blockers.

Ok. that is all for now. Next update will be sometime this weekend, most likely Sunday night.

Cheers!