I have a habit of taking a ridiculous number of photos when working on a project. I especially enjoy looking at the various things I thought were important at the time - every now and then a photo stands out.

Enjoy 🎉

This was one of the earliest photos I could find. On the right is the first prototype I hand soldered to validate the design. On the left is a prototype test fixture that used a bit of discrete logic and a Total Phase Aardvark for functional testing. I was hoping to get away with something simple, however the insertion force was just too great to be done by hand and the idea was scrapped before populating the rest of the board.

I spent a bit of time researching cheaper alternatives to press fit jigs, especially since the naive approach of using pogo pins mounted to perfboard failed miserably. I stumbled across Merifix and purchased a fixture kit (the drilling service is highly recommended). I kept the same interface, but switched to a larger perfboard to better support terminal blocks to connect test probes.

Top side of the test fixture with locating and test probes installed. If you look closely, the prototype PCB lying on the drill plate lacks tooling holes. Fortunately, I was able to remove the locating probes to continue working on the functional test suite while I waited for the next board revision to come in.

Production panels with stencil. Only minor adjustments were needed for this revision; silkscreen artifacts in the prototype were cleaned up and tooling holes were added for test fixture placement.

A shot of my bench after finishing assembly for the first run of boards. It's a mess, but it's home.

I think it was at this point I realized how difficult it is to take good photos using a white background. Lighting will forever be my bane.

Finally, a lazy morning reviewing an early draft of the fabrication drawing.