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Step 8The Cheap Way
There are ways that assembling a UPCB can be made cheaper. I will detail the ones I know as best I can.
The PIC itself is easily the most expensive part. You can sign up for an account on Microchip.com and order samples of this part. If sampling isn't an option, you can order it separately from Newark for a significantly lower price than Digikey.
Digikey's prices on ribbon cables seems a bit high in my mind. The type of ribbon cable we are using is very standard, and you probably have some in your closet, or available for pocket change in an old computer store. The ribbon cable is the exact same kind used by floppy drives and 40 pin IDE cables.
The output was designed to be a DB-15 female port for a couple of good reasons. One of them is that it is the same port used as a game port on PCs. A number of motherboard manufacturers do not put the game port on the motherboard itself, but rather include a piece that goes into an expansion slot with a game port on it, and a ribbon cable connecting it to a header on the motherboard. These can be found in a lot of good computer parts store for very cheap. The ones pictured below were bought for 50 cents each at a local store.
In the Revision 1.0 PCB, there is a defect in the header that this 15 pin ribbon cable would connect to that will cause the chip to malfunction, overheat, and possibly destroy the PIC. Please check the Installation Instructable for more information on how to modify the cable to work properly. If you have a board after the 1.0 revision, don't worry about, just use the cable as-is, the PCB problem was corrected.
The PIC itself is easily the most expensive part. You can sign up for an account on Microchip.com and order samples of this part. If sampling isn't an option, you can order it separately from Newark for a significantly lower price than Digikey.
Digikey's prices on ribbon cables seems a bit high in my mind. The type of ribbon cable we are using is very standard, and you probably have some in your closet, or available for pocket change in an old computer store. The ribbon cable is the exact same kind used by floppy drives and 40 pin IDE cables.
The output was designed to be a DB-15 female port for a couple of good reasons. One of them is that it is the same port used as a game port on PCs. A number of motherboard manufacturers do not put the game port on the motherboard itself, but rather include a piece that goes into an expansion slot with a game port on it, and a ribbon cable connecting it to a header on the motherboard. These can be found in a lot of good computer parts store for very cheap. The ones pictured below were bought for 50 cents each at a local store.
In the Revision 1.0 PCB, there is a defect in the header that this 15 pin ribbon cable would connect to that will cause the chip to malfunction, overheat, and possibly destroy the PIC. Please check the Installation Instructable for more information on how to modify the cable to work properly. If you have a board after the 1.0 revision, don't worry about, just use the cable as-is, the PCB problem was corrected.
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