PCB to order for FED3.2

[Thomas Huff]

Hi all,

My name is Thomas; I'm a PhD student in the Chu lab at Georgetown and have been using the FED3.2 to run operant experiments on some of our PD mouse models. It's been a really great tool! I'm writing because I'm now trying to build some more devices from scratch (partly to save a bit of money and partly as a fun project to learn more about electronics), and I had a question about which PCB I should order. 

From the hackaday page, I found a link to order this board at OSH Park: https://oshpark.com/shared_projects/1GtMZini However, I noticed that the file is dated 2018 and so I wasn't sure if it's been superseded by a newer version. I then found a few different PCB folders on the GitHub page here: https://github.com/KravitzLabDevices/FED3/tree/main/Electronics  But because I'm a novice at electronics and PCB boards, I wasn't quite sure if these were replacements for the hackaday version or perhaps supplements. 

So my question is: If I want to try building a couple of FED3.2 devices from scratch, can I order the PCB board from Hackaday/OSH Park listed above? Or do I need to order an updated PCB (with a new BRD file)?

Thanks in advance for any insights! (I do understand that I can order preassembled kits from openephys, but I thought it would be a good teaching exercise to assemble some from scratch. I have most of the other adafruit components already.)

[Lex]

Hi Thomas, 

Sorry for the delay - I must have missed this message.  The board linked on the Hackaday is a very old version - it was made in 2018 and basically served as a connection board to mount parts from Adafruit, as detailed on the Hackaday build site.  You can build your own FED3 this way, but it is unlikely to be significantly cheaper than buying the pre-built electronics from OpenEphys (OEPS). But if you already have many of the Adafruit parts that will reduce the cost. A hand-built FED3 will run the same code as the OEPS FED3 and operate the same, but the battery life will be worse than the OEPS boards due to some design improvements they made to power handling.

If you want to build the OEPS boards you can also do that with the .brd files on the Github, but I would not advise doing this if you're new to soldering.  There are many small pins that are pretty tough to solder unless you have good equipment (and technique!).  Those boards look like this with a bunch of tiny chips :) 

I hope this helps! -Lex

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