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• What happened... and where's it going?

  morgan • 04/11/2023 at 20:55 • 1 comment

  The Cacoffiny is hands down, one of the coolest projects I've ever done. So why am I only writing about it now, for the first time, 4 years later?

  Because this project was all consuming for basically 10 months of my life. I got final PCBs barely 24 hours before my flight to DEFCON and fought a temperamental pick and place without sleep all night and only to arrive in Las Vegas with 3 partially working boards. This project nearly did me in, so motivating to pick it back up has been difficult, but slowly it's been getting there.

  
  So what happened.....

  Basically I foot gunned myself on the assembly and testing. Because the original layout wasn't square, it required a cumbersome jig to get on the pick and place, which had to be removed before going in the solder over. Worse yet, the test jig I made wasn't sturdy enough for a board on this size and didn't work well enough for the small test points I used. This meant I had to solder jumper wires to test subpanels, 4 alone for the face panel.

  So what's next.....

  At the start of the year I left my full-time job to pursue building and selling electronics like this and my LoRa development boards. I am rebooting this project and hope to have a final revision, with a much more compelling firmware out this fall. In the meantime, several people have express interest, much to my surprise... in purchasing unpopulated PCBs. They're still super fun to assembly, and personally I think look awesome on their own. Selling these as is would be a huge boost in getting this project out later this year. So if you're interested, you can get one here, the first item in my new shop!
  

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