Hey folks,

I did it, I ordered all the parts for the CORE 1.1 prototype!

About the components

Boards and components are on their way, along with a DIY Eurorack case kit to host everything.

Of course, in the rush of buying everything because I want to make this ASAP, I ended up sending PCB files to the fab house with some minor mistakes (USB connector footprint is a bit different from the one I found in stock, 2 diodes and 2 resistors fooprints are smaller than the ones I had to buy, and finally the optocoupler power supply is 3.3V intead of 5V). All in all, silly mistakes that can be easily solved with a couple of flying wires or soldering tricks.

I ended up splitting the project in 5 PCBs: 

• Main board, hosts power, the Teensy and all the analog goodies for the CV outs
• Controls board, hosts all the jacks/LEDs/pots/etc
• USB/MIDI board, hosts the USB and the two MIDI connectors
• TFT module board (it's just a smaller clone of the ubiquitous 2.4" ILI9341 boards)
• Panel (because PCB-made panels are cheaper than aluminum)

You can see them here:

I encountered some issues while making the panel, mainly with the correct spacing of jacks and pots; I ended up changing the pots to Volca-style pots with integrated indicator so that they would take less panel space with respect to a normal pot with knob on it (the spacing between the knobs would have been too little).

I also decided to separate the USB/MIDI controls from the Controls Board because those vertical connectors are longer than the others on the board, therefore they would stick out from the panel and that would look kinda off. 

All in all, I should receive everything for next Friday (not tomorrow), so in the meantime I'll work on the CODEC, IOAPEX, and IOAPEX submodules :)

About the poorness

Well, ordering everything basically had me emptying my bank account. So yeah, I'm going to have a tough time for some weeks. I should receive some extra funding in a couple of weeks (from selling furniture that I had in France and that I couldn't ship back to Italy), with that I'll hopefully cover the expenses for the other prototypes.

Conclusions

I can't wait to solder everything, mount it, see if everything fits properly, check the S&H, program everything etc. 

I'll keep you all updated, next update will probably be me unpacking stuff and soldering it all :)

See you around.

Mick