A milestone worth documenting: the first production photos of the Gen3 LumiBand PCB just arrived from Minewing, our PCB manufacturer and assembly house in China. Twenty units in the first batch.

Seeing your own design come back from a factory fully populated is a different feeling from holding a prototype. Everything you agonized over in EasyEDA is suddenly real and physical.

The module: RF-BM-ND04 Production uses the RF-BM-ND04, a compact nRF52832-based BLE module. Prototyping was done on an nRF52840 but the switch back to nRF52832 for production was straightforward: cost. The nRF52832 handles everything LumiBand needs at a significantly lower bill of materials cost per unit, and at festival scale that difference compounds quickly.

The RF-BM-ND04 is a clean module with good antenna performance and a manageable footprint. Module layout around it was one of the trickier parts of the PCB design.

Tag-Connect pads Programming is via SWD through a Tag-Connect TC2030 footprint: no header pins, no wasted board space. If you haven't used Tag-Connect before it's worth knowing about for any project where you need SWD access without committing to a permanent connector.

What's next Units ship from China in approximately 4 weeks. First order of business when they arrive: flash firmware, verify BLE connectivity, and test the app pairing flow end to end.

Photos in the gallery above show the populated board fresh from the factory.

Meanwhile The Kickstarter pre-launch is live while we wait for the units to arrive - if you want to be notified when the campaign goes live, following is free and genuinely helps with the launch algorithm: Link here