SMD) package and there is no breakout board yet :-(
Hmmm, I thought: I have a small tip (0.016") for my OKi soldering station, so... well, why not?
So, after a few false starts (and a couple of ruined FC30s later), I decided to mount the chip on the bottom of one of my trusty MSP430F2012 EZ430 boards (3 for $10)
So, I used a dab of 5-minute epoxy to hold it in place and began to solder jumpers between the EZ430 and the FC30. Wire-wrap wire (30 AWG) proved to be to thick (and heavy), so I used individual strands of wire from an old test lead cable.
I used a 5 Diopter Luxo magnifier lamp so I could see what I was doing (Oh, those are so nice but pricey. But they are worth it. You position them and they don't move! I have a "low end" KFM1A).
It took a couple of nights (fora total of 2 hours) and I checked for bridges using my son's microscope at 40X. It didn't look pretty, but it held.
Since I was using bare wire strands, I had to be careful not to short them together, so I "layered" epoxy between wires that crossed each other.
I was very careful not to cover the contacts (yet) with epoxy in case I had to rework the solder. When I got all of the pins soldered (I basically ran the interrupt lines to P1.1, P1.3 and P1.4 on the MSP430) I did a quick continuity check to make sure nothing was shorted. Next, I wrote a little app to detect orientation and tested it in the IAR debugger. Things were looking good!
(At this point, I must admit that I have prior experience with this sensor -- with help I managed to kludge a similar wiring job but to a 1 inch protoboard, not directly onto an EZ430. So, I was already familiar with how the FC30 works.)
Once everything looked good, a added a liberal dollop of epoxy to the bottom of the MSP430, and now I have a nice little development board to play around with orientation sensing.
Breakout board? We don't need no stinkin Breakout board. (Yeah, right...)
This was an exercise inspired by the amazing Willard Wigan.
