Thanks for pointing me to that section of the datasheet!

Do you suppose that they mean "always have that cap" or "you only need the cap if you have VDD_CHG supplying some voltage"? It seems to be the latter, but I wonder what your more-experienced opinion is on this matter. I want to be able to design my PCB correctly, but also the most simply.





So, if there are no pins sticking out from under the edges of the bluetooth chip itself, then my PCB should be designed so that at least its blank pads stick out from under it, so that I can at least get an iron onto the pads?

This sounds really iffy because, what if, when I pre-prime all the pads with solder, I don't get them all to the same height (thickness of solder) and then some of them don't seat down fully. Then some of them never touch and there is not enough heat transferred to get the solder to bond. It seems like this chip was designed to be made entirely with full flow soldering, and screw us hobbyists.

Is there an alternative for hand soldering this type of chip? Maybe there is a such thing as a carrier socket for this kind of chip?





For the empeg player startup messages, I need to be able to know when the empeg is there and ready to accept commands. I also need to know when the player application has started so that I can pause the player so that it waits for the bluetooth to be connected before it starts playing the song. Otherwise it will be spooling out a song to nobody since there is no bluetooth listening. Once bluetooth connects then it will play the song. On my Honda, it takes longer for the car stereo to boot up and connect to the bluetooth than it takes for the empeg to boot up and start playing music. So if I don't do this then, each time I turn off the car and back on again, I lose something like 17 seconds' worth of whatever song was playing. It's worse if I'm turning on the car and listening to something other than the empeg, such as the car's CD player, the car's radio, or a passenger's cell phone bluetooth, then in that case the empeg would just spool out songs forever to nobody listening. So I need those player startup messages as cues to know if the empeg is booted up or not. There's still a small amount of bugfix needed in this area, but when it's all fixed it will work correctly.

For the @@ messages, I indeed just check for the @@ signs first. Then I do different processing depending on the symbol which follows the @@ signs, and if there is not a match, then that processing doesn't occur.


Thanks for your help!