My circuit boards have arrived!

I have to give a special thinks to PCBWay for these. They gave me a good discount on getting these boards made, and they even sourced and populated the SMT parts for me. They even were able to get the motor driver IC that is out of stock at all the US suppliers.
All I need to do is add the though-hole components. They were so far, I am actually still waiting on some of the parts to arrive before I build up the board.

The board itself is four layers, with more time and a less symmetrical layout I could probably get it down to two layers. I designed it in CircuitMaker. You can get the design file here.

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So I decided on a method for my enclosure construction. I wanted something that didn't require me to sand the whole curve into the enclosure, and I wanted something that folks to reproduce. I debated trying to use a wood CNC, but most of the software I could find did inaccurate 2 .5D etching, or charge huge amounts for true 3D sculpting.

What I ended up settling on was to use lots of layers of laser-cut plywood with dowels to make the main structure. This section will be covered with a thin real wood veneer.

The front will be made from 1/2" of maple, and the back will be a 1/4" piece of maple., both with rounded edges.

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It took a few hours to glue up the 45+ layers together. If I were to do it again I would use 6mm (1/4") plywood to save on the total number of layers.


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I then waited 24 hours to the glue to fully cure. I used a belt sander to remove all the glue and the laser burnt edges. I then slathered the surface in wood filler (I smoothed and removed most of it after taking this photo)

Once that fully sets I will sand and paint the surface with a filler primer. This will then become the base that gets wrapped with the veneer.