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First mistake

A project log for POVIT

There is simply not enough blinking LEDs in this world.

peter-gPeter G 05/25/2014 at 00:331 Comment

Already a PCB mistake and the boards have not even been delivered yet. Luckily it's a purely cosmetic one but I'll mention it here to hopefully keep others from repeating it.

I used PCB-pool for the first rev of the boards since they also throw in free stencils if you order 10 boards or less. If you order 11 you will be charged $90 for the stencils, I don't quite get that one...  Anyway, 10 boards was just fine with me so I placed the order. Normally I use gerbers for transfering the file but they charged extra to process standard gerbers so I used their Altium file option. Sending the PCB source file to a board-house has always made me a bit twitchy but this will be open sourced eventually anyway, so what the heck I though.

Altium has no good way of putting artwork like logos on a PCB so the standard workaround is to stick your logo in a truetype font and print it as a character on the PCB. Well, the font was apparently not embedded in the source file and since the board-house does not have the same font it's obviously not going to print correctly. That is why I have a big lowercase "m" on the board. 

Oh well, live and learn.

Discussions

jay-t wrote 06/02/2014 at 16:46 point
I got my Propeller One boards from iteadstudio, the quality was good. They accepted the gerber files I created with the Kicad PCB tool. I had to rename the files to match their naming system, but that was all I really needed to prepare this. Overall I was lucky with the boards.

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