Populated PCB

Soldering is all done. I tested the board and everything seems to work well. I did discover a little mechanical errors with my board, the ICSP header and IMU are a little too close, and I have to remove the IMU to use the ICSP. Overall I'm quite happy how things turned out. The final board weighs in at 50g.

PCBs Arrived

After patiently waiting 3 weeks, I finally received my PCBs from BatchPCB. These are the first PCBs I have ever sent out to be manufactured. Pricing models, gerber files, board thickness, etc. have always seemed so intimidating but, BatchPCB and a tutorial at SparkFun made the process easy. With shipping, it came out to be less than $50. I just hope it works.

If you noticed in the photo above I received two PCBs but I only ordered one. I've heard this happening with BatchPCB. I'm not really sure if it's an artifact of how they build their panels but I'm not complaining.

Now I'm off to a fun night of soldering all the parts. The board has three ATmega328 that are in TQFP32 packages and since I have never soldered anything with a pitch that small it should be interesting. After watching numerous surface mount soldering tutorials on YouTube it doesn't look to be all that hard.

Here are some more pictures of the board...

Front



Back

Rigol DS1052E Oscilloscope

New equipment! I received my Rigol DS1052E oscilloscope today. I choose this oscilloscope based on the glowing reviews by Dave over at the EEVblog. After I play with it for a while I'll need to post my own review.

I bought it from Amazon because I had a bunch of Amazon gift certificates, but you can find elsewhere.