The PCBs arrived from the fab today.  They look excellent.  I set them up for 25 boards per panel and got a stainless steel solder paste stencil along with them.  

Over the weekend I ordered 25 PIC16F1455 microcontrollers so I could assemble some boards ahead of the main order of PICs from Microchip.  Programming 25 boards manually isn't too bad, especially after going through the work of assembling them.

Assembly and reflow went well.  My reflow oven might be running a little hot.  I noticed the silkscreen is slightly darker than the bare PCBs still in the packaging.  Besides that the assembled boards look and work just as well as the boards I've gotten pre-assembled.   

I broke apart the panel and tried programming one of the boards without soldering pins onto the ICSP header.  It didn't work.  So I figured it just wasn't making a good enough connection and I soldered on a set of pins.  It still didn't work.  I was pretty worried at this point, but the basic design of the PCB was the same, and all of the solder joints looked great.  To try and isolate the problem I attached the PICkit3 programmer to one of my prototype boards.  It didn't work.  Whew.  It wasn't the new boards.  Finally I followed the tried and true method of unplugging and then replugging the PICkit3 programmer and trying again.  Success!

I programmed and tested about 8 boards so far.  All programmed successfully and the TinyFPGA programmer GUI has no problem recognizing the hardware and communicating with a #TinyFPGA A-Series board.

The breadboard in the picture was my basic testbench for developing the firmware for the PIC.  I had connected my logic analyzer to the JTAG pins to view and debug the JTAG programming flow as well as performance issues.  

All of my boards are open source and open hardware, but this is the first board to actually contain the logo.

I should be placing the boards for sale on @Tindie by next week.  I only have 25 boards until the pre-programmed PICs come in.  Speaking of, I just received an email from @Microchip Technology that the 200 PIC16F1455 chips have been programmed and shipped.  At that point I'll assemble them one panel at a time.  I'm still working on exact pricing, but I can confirm they will be available with the right-angle header soldered on for less than $10.  I could also sell bare PCBs and boards without the right-angle header for a discount.

I'm really excited to bring this programmer to market.  It's significantly cheaper than the alternatives and will make #TinyFPGA A-Series even more accessible.  Once this is for sale I have more open TinyFPGA projects and products in the works.

Stay tuned.