Chapter 8: Bringing Up the Board for the First Time

Having designed, constructed, cleaned, and inspected the printed circuit board, it is now time to apply power – in other words, perform the infamous smoke test. This chapter will lead you through the process of carefully providing first-time power to the board and checking basic circuit-level functionality. If you discover any problems, this chapter contains suggested approaches for fixing them. Once the board has passed these tests, we will continue to work on the FPGA logic, and will test the digital interface to the oscilloscope board.

After completing this chapter, you will have learned how to prepare the circuit for initial power application and how to test circuit components for proper operation. You will also understand how to identify and fix problems with the assembled circuit, and will have also checked out the digital interface to the circuit board.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter: ...