Macrofab has produced our PCBs and pick-and-place has finished up on the boards. They're now completing some hand soldering, and I have a list of the things that didn't work right on our first spin.
The tale of woe goes a bit like this...
- P2 we got a 20 pin instead of a 40 pin (TODO: New part selection)
- For P2, I misread the data sheet, believing that "2 x 20" meant "40 pins". It actually meant "Two rows of ten pins, totaling 20 pins total."
The data sheet was mostly in Chinese. Ooops.
- For P2, I misread the data sheet, believing that "2 x 20" meant "40 pins". It actually meant "Two rows of ten pins, totaling 20 pins total."
- P1 orientation - need indicator on board for manufacturing
- Less of a failure and more of a "Damn, why didn't I think of that." P1 is a tilt-switch, and will work regardless of orientation. However, since the fab house didn't know what to do, this halted production until I could email them with a proper orientation for the switch.
- Forgot path for VR_PA
- This effectively made the radio dead. No VR_PA, no output voltage.
- All Inductors Wrong footprint (1206 vs 0805)
- This one, oh, what a massive fail here. All of the radio inductors didn't fit! Since VR_PA was disconnected anyway, I gave up on this and told them to not populate any of the inductors, further ensuring that the radio really would not work when it came back from the fab.
- Hashed copper fill problem (on board rev2)
This last one was probably the most interesting bug of them all. I did the copper pours as hashed-outline fills, tickling a bug in the SVG generation at Macrofab and apparently breaking the PCB preview process. The system "tried to create an SVG file with thousands of lines combined to fill a region." and that's an expensive operation. This was apparently bad enough that Macrofab had to update their KiCad docs.
I'm glad I could help everyone else with my dumb mistake.
I expect that I might actually have boards in hand by Friday or Monday. We'll see what else is broken when they show up.
I also expect that the LED layout will not be to my liking, but I'll verify that when the boards come back.
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