Ok, so now we need an onboard speaker for playing startup theme tunes
I can’t do that, Dave.
Wait, that is Hal, maybe I am not as old as I thought I was around here, LOL
Daisy, daisy…
Hmmm… Also Sprach Zarathustra in 8-bit… Somehow, I think it would lose something in the translation. I like the Bigweld idea better…
We have board manufacturing options! Talked to a couple manufacturers, they are interested. New prototypes arrive Wednesday.
We all need to take straws? Lol
Or is that glasses of coolaid…? Lol
Sorry I missed you leaving Riley, The theme of this MRRF for me was “come to my table” Of course it was always fun and worth it but I did not get to hang with the crew much at all.
So when this board passes all the test I will probably order 10 or so of them. The people that plan on using them right away and are okay with some terminal commands in case we have issues. That is who should be the ones to get them, let you guys mess with them for a week or so then ramp up the batch size after that.
No worries on the leaving thing. I am glad i left. Storms so big here last night we lost power for about 4 hours! I was just looks at newtechs videos yesterday, looks real promising!! Hard to believe one lil board/chip can do soooo much!
Hmm, just realized Knight 2000 grill was pimped with just 8 individually addressable lights, which is 5 more than MK4…
Yeah and back then it had to be real lights to, now leds!!!
It has come up hundreds of times in conversations with fellow maker types… “Man, if only we had Arduino growing up.” For example dad’s Nissan maxima would have had the “kit heartbeat” in the grille, all day long!
Ok. Now this is cool. What if we make our own boards. Check out the below link!!!
I’m down! I need to try milling out the “dead copper” like that… takes more milling time and a tool change, but could save time in assembly and testing. That board also looks pretty easy to solder in general (lots of space between joints etc).
That’s a pretty cool project.
For the CNC milled boards, in my experience, there’s just no point anymore. Commercial boards are so cheap and so, so, so much better quality that I normally get mine manufactured externally even when they’re simple enough to mill.
We have an LPKF S63 PCB mill at work that I’ve used a decent amount, as well as a PCB riveting tool for doing conductive through-connections that are still solderable.
The thing is that a single-sided PCB designs are so compromised in so many ways in terms of signal integrity and routing complexity. Double-layers are hard to do well on a milled board without putting a ton of links/rivets in, etc.
It can definitely be done, but what you come out with is remarkably inferior to what can be purchased for significantly less than the components that will be assembled onto it.
We still use ours for things like large capacitor arrays where getting the large and heavy copper boards made externally is expensive and they’re simple enough that they don’t need 2 layers.
In my experience, there’s no point to rubbing out the copper unless you need isolation for higher voltages (>200V) or ultra high frequencies (>GHz). It’s just wasting time and tool life.
I have no experience, so i will follow the cheap advice. But it aure qould be cool to have a cicuit board i milled, lol.
There’s definitely a satisfaction to starting from that lower level, for sure. After a couple of boards, the extra assembly effort and questionable results really take the shine off, though, in my experience
I have to agree that assembly and imperfections can be a downer. On top of that some cheaper mills can have a range of runout in one box. The pcb milling process has a lot of variables compared to many other things in cnc. That said it is hard to beat milled pcb when it comes to quick turn around one off stuff.