The Boards Are Finally Here
I received our boards on the 1st of July and they looked great! Here are the first looks…
We were both so excited to get working on them we added an extra day to our normal work schedule! Aside from the normal concern of the board functioning at all, was the looming question “Could we actually hand solder the some of the parts we had selected to use?” After all, the pads of our smallest part were only 0.014” x 0.032” and there were 5 of those pads within a 0.130” distance.
Here are some photos of us getting ready and doing some of the initial soldering…
Findings So Far
We found a couple flaws in the board that night and as Aaron continued tinkering that week, he found a couple more. All in all, the board seems about 80% functional and will help us start working on a few of the project we have slated for it. We were pretty disappointed with the mistakes we found, but it was our first attempt at our own PCB design from scratch. We are logging all the bugs we find and will be ramping up on the next version shortly. I predict we’ll have the next version in hand within a couple months.
In The Mean Time
While we make the corrections and are waiting for the next boards, we’ll continue developing our documentation, adding source to our GitHub project, and filling out our Pi Shield Project page