The boards have finally arrived. The past 12 months have been a mixture of waiting for parts, software design for FPGA IP Cores (harder than expected) and communicating to a thankfully perceptive PCBWay for fixing possible part conflicts with my BOM. I probably should have been keeping a better log of respins, however, I wasn't sure how interesting an update of, "changing part due to shortage" or, "Oh this is how to do JTAG the correct way with an FMC" would have been to an average purveyor of the dark arts of electronics. But now all that has changed. The boards have arrived. The rails aren't shorted. The LEDs turn on. It's time... to test some hardware!

The first thing I had to do with the incoming boards was replace an inductor. It couldn't be sourced in China, and the shipping tariffs cost for only 20 dollars in parts may induce seizures in those who are frugally inclined. DigiKey has a really great article on it here that I used with this hot air reflow station, which worked well for soldering the inductor. The Cliff Notes of soldering an IC with hidden pads are:

• apply no clean tack flux
• tin pads
• apply heat to pads until they glisten and begin to flow on the pads. It's obvious when you see the solder "bubble up"
• slap on the IC in hopefully the correct orientation

The power up sequence of the Kria SOM means that I needed to do some soldering to pull the enables for the PL and PS side voltage regulators to 5V to check their voltages before connecting it to the Kria SOM. The Aper-Oculus requires a 12V brick with a 5.5mm plug. I have currently  only tested it with this brick, but be warned it doesn't include the wall plug, so you have to buy this from Amazon to make it usable. Checking the voltage was quick and easy, and all my regulators were the correct voltage except for the SLVS-EC, which appears to have been given the wrong resistor during production, which was most likely a communication issue between PCBWay and I, but easy enough to fix.

After testing all the boards, it was found that one of them most likely has a bad IC14 (MP5016), and the 12V line won't power on. I ordered some from Mouser, and will re-solder a new IC later to salvage the board.

Next, is programming all the necessary IC to program and boot the Kria SOM, which I'll provide in another update.