BLACKBOARD - the Elk Pi Breakout / Controller board

Hardware
21

Hiya

I have been trying to open the blackboard schematics in order to more rapidly create a template pcb with headers accurately placed for connection to the elk board itself. Unfortunately I do not own Altium and the “free” versions of Altium like Circuit Maker and Upverter don’t actually work with the Altium project on Github.

EasyEDA might work but it requires files to be saved as acii rather than binary. Upverter is happy with SCH or SCH+BRD but not Altium project files, even though it says it can open Altium projects.

Is there any way you could re export to a different format or just as ascii rather than binary? Or even better set up a circuitmaker project for easy cloning?

Thanks

22

Hey!

I just spoke with our hardware engineer consultant and he said that unfortunately it’s not very easy. However, there is a tool which sort of works https://github.com/thesourcerer8/altium2kicad. Its kinda okay for the schematics, but not very good for the pcb.

Hope this helps!
Sharan

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23

Hi Sharan

Thanks for trying, I managed to get the schematics sorted out through exactly that software thanks. Like you say the pcb bit did not work so well. Thanks for your help though, its much appreciated!

Mike

24

Hi, another question regarding the blackboard. I have one of the first elkpi boards that I got from @Stefano in audio developers conference 2019. I’d like to get a blackboard, but I seem to remember reading somewhere that blsckboard is not compatible with this very first elkpi that I got. Can I get a confirmation about that? Also, any idea if you’ll have blackboards in stock anytime soon? Thanks!

25

Hi @frederic!

No, the incompatible one was an earlier prototype version, yours is fine.

I think we ran out of Elk Pi boards atm but we should have single blackboards available, try to ask at support@elk.audio

26

awesome, I’ll send an email straight away! thanks

27

Hi, I just got my blackboard and I wanted to try out the examples. However, when I try to run run_sequencer_minimal I get this error:
main_app_minimal: error: I2C device not found on address: 0x3C

the blackboard hat seems to be sitting just fine, in fact I’m using the audio out from the board and it just works. ideas?

EDIT: in case this is of any help, this is the output of i2cdetect :

elk-pi:~$ i2cdetect -y 0      
     0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  a  b  c  d  e  f
00:          -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
10: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
20: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
30: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
40: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
50: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
60: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
70: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

I guess I should see something here?

28

oh, found it…
the issue was that sensei was not running because it could not find the config file and it was failing silently. now it seems to work fine. thanks anyway!

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