blinkie boards ordered

[johnridley]

I'm used to stuff from China, even in-stock stuff, taking 10 days to arrive. I'm seeing threads online that PCBCart delivers stuff in 10 days even though they have to make it first. Hopefully this is the case. I don't need most of them until June, but I'm supposed to have a few demos by Capricon to show off at the Duckon party.

Looks like I'm in just under the wire. They have a holiday Feb 2-8, and they say they knock off a couple of days before that, and won't be doing anything during that time. I should hopefully have my boards in hand before then.

Guess I'd better get moving on programming new patterns.

A friend rendered this for me. The board is actually black with yellow silk screening (therefore a yellow duck) but beggars can't be choosers.

Comments

[c0nsumer.livejournal.com]

Did you use a groundplane?

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

No, no particular reason to. I was thinking about filling the empty regions with small copper ducks, but I figured this being my first board, I'd just keep it simple.

[c0nsumer.livejournal.com]

Ah, okay. I think it makes layout so much easier that I'm just used to seeing it, and thus your layout confused me a little. I understand now that there's a second layer and such as well which handles the rest of the wires.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

There was really no way to do this without two layers unless I made ridiculously tiny wires and ran between lots of pairs of pads, and besides, 2 sided boards don't really cost any more than single sided boards.

I could have laid in a ground plane, it's pretty trivial on Eagle, but I didn't really see a reason to do so.

[c0nsumer.livejournal.com]

Yeah, double-sided really is the way to go. It makes soldering a lot easier as well.

Did you get enough of these that you'll have spares to sell? The blank PCBs with BOM and source for the firmware? I think it'd be nifty to build one up and play with patterns.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I only ordered 200 boards, and right now the plan is to make 200 kits and sell them all to Duckon. If there are boards left over, I'll be storing them at my place after June and I may have permission to sell them between then and next June.

The place that used to do Duckon blinkies is www.2dkits.com, and they actually have a business selling these things. They have the source code on their sites. They use PICs so you'll need a PICkit or something to program them with.