I've managed to hand-route the entire board (the autorouter was an evil, evil monster) and get it to pass DRC (design rules check). The first important step in getting our prototype done. 

I also spent the last six hours working on the bill-of-materials. This has required me to go back quite a few times and change parts on the circuit board. It's a lot of work. 

Most of my changes are things like, "Hey, Macrofab's house parts list has the resistor I want, but it's only available in 0603, so now let's go back and change the board to fix that, because we specified 0805 before."

The takeaway here is: "If you are designing a PCB, get all of your footprints 100% dead-on before you start running traces." Going back and changing things after you've passed DRC sucks and creates a shitload more work to deal with.

Looking at the schedule here I feel like we're about a month late. I had a prototype, in hand (in 2017) around the end of January. The big difference between 2017 and 2019 is that now we know what we're doing, and the operating system is built already. Bill's got that seriously under control and the OS is already up and running on the BMD340. 

Having the prior work to fall back on gives us time to work on all sorts of crazy nonsense like the new LED driver code, and 

I'm going to throw in some photos at the end of this so you can a) see how crazy the PCB routing is and b) get excited about what we're doing.

Tomorrow afternoon I'm going to start in on the Kickstarter video. That's going to be a lot easier too because I've gotten way, way better at video editing and have better gear than I had in 2017. 

I have to say that it's extremely gratifying to get to this point. I almost gave up last week because the routing was so hard. 

In March I'm heading to SXSW Interactive/Music/Film in Austin, TX. I hope some of you show up, and I really hope I get to meet up with the Macrofab guys again. It was great to talk to them.  If you'll be there, ping me. Let's have a Shiner and listen to some music.

Oh yeah! Photos... 

Here's the routing so far. We're doing a 4-layer board here. 

And here's the 3d view: