PCBs: Pile on the Ice Cubes

The PCBs arrived in the post today, turns out the slow boat from China has probably been upgraded to a Hydrofoil. With the PCBs here the final construction of all the ODOTS units (I have parts for)  is now under way, with a quick order to Mouser (sorry RS, they had nicer enclosures) to grab the final bits and pieces. The boards that have now been put together (Two in a couple of hours) both work well.

The PCBs have come out really rather well, and current testing indicates that I only made one massive mistake, so all is looking good. (Not least because the error is just a missed connection, easily fixed with a sneaky extra wire!). I am amazed how clean the manufacture of them is, and attaching components has been easy enough that I have vowed to never again use Protoboard on anything that I need more than one of, never again.

So nice, so clean, so ... green.

The improvement over the strip board in visual quality is incredible, as is the reduction in board foot print (1.5 cm less length!). Additionally because there are no wires to solder in (apart from the one to fix the missed connection), and a very limited number of mounting points (all of which are labelled), putting the board together is straightforward. While the stripboard took a day to put together and was tricky to debug (as well as having lots of error prone wires), the PCB goes together in an hour and is neat enough that debugging is less daunting.

PCB > Stripboard. Smaller, neater, certainly more professional.

In the image above the PCB has had its RFID unit added, and the wires have been made to loop over the not-yet-present battery. The two boards put together today have really brought the end of this stage of the project into view. Of course, I managed to plug one of the board into an Arduino board (acting as a serial bridge) backwards and now the Arduino board (my only suitable one) has stopped talking - but that is a problem for another day!

Increasingly precise perfection approximations...

Led's mounted on the reverse side so that they will stick through the enclosure.