Today is an exciting day because my manufactured PC boards arrived from China. As I expected them to be, they are gorgeous. Don't be fooled by my poor photography. All the silk screen is crisp and clear, and all the plated copper lands are bright and shiny. (The purple posts are a PCB holder of mine and not part of the board.)

This round of PCBs was sponsored by PCBWay.com, by which I mean they contacted me and gave me a coupon to cover the cost of making them and shipping them to me.

It took less than 2 weeks from uploading my design files to getting the boards in my hands. That was with "global standard shipping", which is pretty reasonably priced. They also have DHL shipping, which I know from experience to be significantly faster, but it's quite a bit more expensive. (I live on the US west coast, and many China shipments come in through Los Angeles, so things get to me pretty fast once they are turned over to in-country carriers.)

It takes 1-2 days to actually manufacture the boards, and you can follow the progress as your design moves from stage to stage during the process. If you like to geek out on that stuff, it's pretty fun.

I designed the schematic and board in KiCad. I'll be uploading the KiCad design files in a bit. Here's a screenshot of KiCad's rendering of the layout:

And here is what KiCad's 3D model of the (mostly) populated board looks like.

Due to "day job" priorities, I won't be able to tinker with this too much for a few days, but here is my plan:

1. Populate the board with enough components to operate Fan 1. If I find mistakes on the board, I won't have wasted too many parts.
2. Prove the ESPHome firmware that I used with the breadboard still works with the PCB.
3. Populate the rest of the components on the board. Even though I plan to only use 3 fans, I want to have a reference copy of the board with everything populated.
4. More firmware testing with 4 fans hooked up.

Assuming all that works without discovering any design blunders, I'll finish up design of the project case and fan mounting brackets.