Well we missed our January 18th target by 2 days, but the prototype design has been ordered. We hope to have them in house by February 15th. This gives us about 2 weeks of slack time in case the fab and assembly takes longer than expected.

We did an initial prototyping round back November but did not map the pins properly. This meant most of the peripherals simply didn't work. We learned a few things but had to revert to our dev kits for development and prototyping.

To avoid issues with today's prototypes we ordered an interim "Risk Reduction" test board from OSH Park. This included most peripherals from the BOM we were concerned with and allows us the flexibility to breadboard some of our assumptions. Two issues were identified:

1. We had the wrong connector for our display (we chose a top contact and needed bottom)
2. The display connector footprint was missing solder paste layer

We were able to work around both issues and test the display (which works quite nicely) and even found a better, cheaper, and stronger connector. Win win! As a final step, several PCB layers were printed (actual size) to verify footprints and size. A comparison with our DC24 badge is below.

While we wait impatiently for the prototypes to arrive, we're using the risk reduction board and dev kit to continue software development.