Yesterday I have assembled the SMD parts on all three prototype 1Bitsy 1UP boards. Thanks to a stencil and reflow oven the longest part was placing the parts on the board by hand. (these are too few boards to program a pick and place for, obviously) At the end it only took two and a half hours to put it all together. The 1UP does not have that many placements, yet. :D

Next I went to the local hackerspace to cut out some backing plates for the devices. It took me a little bit to learn how to create files from kicad that the laser software would accept. (they have an older but made by a large company laser cutter, it is mind blowing how utterly terrible the drivers for that thing are. Also QCad is a horrible software package, but it seems to be the best software to generate prints that the laser cutter will understand, it is just piles of annoying things >_< ) At the end I did end up with usable acrylic plates, unfortunately I forgot to try making cutouts for the battery. Something I have planned to decrease the thickness of the system.

But I got some prototypes made and learned the workflow that this laser cutter accepts. YEY! :D

Next I soldered in all the through hole parts on the boards, and started testing things one by one. I have found some solder points that were not properly reflown. (the standard flat JST connector was not properly soldered) But then things started working one after another. I had to do some minor changes to the gamepad shift register read out code. I am actually not sure why it worked with the SNES controller in the first place. :)

But all the parts that I have code for seem to be working fine now. I have it sitting here next to me running the munching squares demo. I am really curious how long that Panasonic 3500mAh battery will last. :D ... According to math it should last a very very long time. :)

Next goal is to finish assembling the other two systems. And maybe make another trip to the hackerspace to tinker with some other plate solutions. Otherwise I need to write lots of code and test the other subsystems. aka. SDCard reader, audio out (including digital potentiometer) and capacitive touch. I am very excited to see the hardware work! :D