This is my first PCB release! A major milestone and a long climb. I think I'm getting the hang of the basics in KiCad, and it's a lot of fun. Three pages of schematics, and a 3x6 inch PCB, and a few hours of learning curve...

This is the V0.1 release, and I'm going for speed in the fabrication realm so it's a standard green board. Here's a rendering from KiCad, and this will be the backside of the badge:

I learned it's not possible to route traces at the corners of the board when I have the quarter-circles drawn, so I had to delete the rounded corners to in order to route and push traces around. One of the many little stumbling blocks along the way of learning KiCad I suppose!

The main page of the schematic is by far the busiest. One of the project goals is that the matrix will be directly controllable in the firmware. This opens the door for the user to experiment and learn how to control the resistors directly from the code instead of pushing that decoding into other hardware. Similarly, the sensing circuit is minimal to enable flexibility via code. The primary goal of this project is to make core memory an interactive experience, but a secondary goal is to enable learning and creativity to flow from the experience of programming this contraption.

All of the components are ordered and mostly received... I took some risk on the cores and wire by ordering from eBay and I think they will come on a slow boat. I do have a handful of spare cores that should get me started for board bring-up though.

Goodies that made it into the first prototype:

• Pimoroni Unicorn Hat aka "An equine banquet of 64 WS2812B RGB LEDs in a handy, expressive 8x8 grid"
• OLED display on the front [optional]
• Adafruit Microlipo charger
• Teensy LC (just enough IO!)
• A hidden reed switch
• A hidden hall switch

The next update log should will share the excitement of bringing the PCB to life, and the creation of a list of the opportunities for improvement in the next version.