I finished testing the major systems of the CAT Board about four weeks ago. Based on what I found, I made the following changes:

• Straightened out the MISO/MOSI mess between the FPGA, serial configuration flash, and the Raspberry Pi. Now the FPGA should be programmable from either the RPi (during development) or the flash (for dedicated applications).
• Added series resistors between the RPi SPI pins and the FPGA/flash chips to prevent any possible contention while still letting the RPi get control of the FPGA.
• Fixed the footprint for the SATA connectors which I first created in 2004 with Eagle and either didn't get right or it changed since then. (Of course, this required some adjustments to the layout since the new footprint is wider and the two connectors were already very close together.)
• Rerouted the SATA I/O lines from the FPGA in order to get 100-ohm differential impedances.
• Simplified the way the voltage is programmed for the adjustable VCCIO_3 bank of FPGA I/Os. (Now it's done just by changing a single resistor instead of using solder-bridge jumpers.)

I regenerated the gerber files and went looking for someone to fabricate them. I previously used PCBWay and they did a good job for $180, but 3 of the 11 boards they sent had enough soldermask misalignment to make me leery of using them. I had also considered PCBCart, but at the time their prices were considerably higher (around $230, as I recall). But when I went back and requoted them again, the cost had dropped to $167.

So I submitted the gerbers to PCBCart's online ordering system and waited. They fabricated the PCB in a week and shipped it ... to New Caledonia! Now you may not know where New Caledonia is (I know I didn't), but it's best described as "the ass-end of nowhere": hundreds of miles off the east coast of Australia in the middle of the South Pacific. The only way to get farther from North Carolina in the USA would be to ship to Samoa (which, I guess, makes that "the colon-end of nowhere".)

This screwup was caused by some interaction between the automatic address fill-in feature of Google Chrome and the PCBCart web forms, and by me not checking the PCBCart status emails closely. PCBCart got my billing address mostly correct, but the shipping address was completely whacked and I never noticed.

So my CAT Board PCBs currently sit in New Caledonia, enjoying the onset of Fall in the Southern Hemisphere. DHL will tranship them from there to me for $163. What I'm hoping is that the shipment will be undeliverable and DHL will return it to PCBCart who can then send it to me for less than that.

We'll see.