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Spin, Spun.

A project log for The ides of DEFCON: An Unofficial Electronic Badge

A wearable hardware badge, featuring blinky lights, sound, a sub-1Ghz radio, games, and more. Based on the Freescale KW01.

john-adamsJohn Adams 12/31/2016 at 11:090 Comments

Forgive me Macrofab, it is been a week since my last spin...

I don't have the rev1 boards back yet, but a careful analysis of our schematic tells me that I blew the entire RF section.

RF is, well, hard. I misread the reference schematic and didn't realize I'd forgotten to connect VR_PA to the inductors/matching circuit, so I will just assume that any chance of RF output is now lost.

I also did a few dumb things. I didn't let the autorouter finish correctly and the boards that I manufactured were four layer (2x price) when they could have been a 2-layer board with proper vias and would have been far, far less money.

Moving a number of our inductors to 0603 and rerouting parts to the back of the boards made 2-layer possible for far less money.

I'd also forgotten one of the ground fills, our logos, and a bunch of other crap.

The per-board prototype price is down around $140 now, and our bulk price is in the $30-60 a board range before screens and batteries, so that's great.

I might even go ahead and try to repurpose our battery as a phone charger, but we'll see!

At least our boards are looking better, and much more together now.

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