PD Buddy Wye

After the problems I had with the last batch of boards, I went back to the drawing board.  Well, back to hackaday.io anyway, where I found #Business Card Gamepad, which I figured might be a solution to my USB Type-C receptacle woes.  I found the relevant drawing in the USB Type-C spec and drew it as a KiCad footprint, which I then used to make a new version of the board.  Since it has to be 0.6 mm thick now, I couldn't order this board from OSH Park, so I went to Dirty PCBs instead.  The quality is quite good; the boards aren't dirty at all.

I originally considered gluing on thin pieces of single-sided copper-clad FR4 to act as shield pads.  I tried this on one board and found that it made no positive difference to functionality or robustness.  Securing them well enough was difficult, and excess glue caused some problems.  So, I ultimately decided to leave them out.

The new board works just as well as the older board revisions, and is much easier to build because I only have one connector to solder now.  I just listed them on Tindie, at a reduced price due to the lower material cost.  Hopefully this will be the end of the PD Buddy Wye supply problems!

I just got another batch of boards from OSH Park, and they're not good.  Some of the holes appear to have a bit of soldermask inside of them, and others are drilled too small or plated too thick so the tiny pins of the USB connectors can't fit.  I'm disappointed, but not surprised—these boards are a little beyond OSH Park's design rules, so I can't fault them for not being made perfectly.

To avoid problems like these in the future, I suppose the only options now are to either look for a different fab or stop selling the PD Buddy Wye.  I'll start looking for a fab that can handle such tiny features at a reasonable price.

The PD Buddy Wye is now available on Tindie!  If you have a PD Buddy Sink and want to make full use of the new features in firmware version 1.1, I encourage you to check it out!

The PCBs arrived from @oshpark last week, and they're just great as usual.  Once again, the slight design rule violation for the USB Type-C receptacles wasn't a problem.

EDIT: I just realized that the boards were actually made a bit better than I expected!  There's a small radius (0.3 mm) at the inside corners where the Type-C plug mounts.  I understand that OSH Park's boards are usually milled out with a drill of radius 1.27 mm, so when I ordered the boards I expected to have to file these corners to make the connectors fit.  When it came time to assemble them, I didn't think about it and the connectors fit perfectly.  Now that I look closely, I see some evidence that those corners were milled with a smaller bit to match the board outline in the design.  So thank you OSH Park for the unexpectedly well made boards!

I assembled one of the boards today (I ordered the parts from Arrow on Tuesday.  They said they'd ship the same day, but the didn't ship until Friday.  Also, apparently "overnight shipping" means "next business day shipping"), and it works perfectly!  I'll assemble the others soon, and I'll list them on Tindie soon after that.

I just finished version 1.0 of the PD Buddy Wye board, and ordered three from OSH Park.  In a few weeks I get to find out if I made any mistakes!  If not, there will be much rejoicing, and I'll be listing two on Tindie shortly thereafter.