A while ago, PCBWay reached out about sponsoring a new spin of the TIGER control board. The timing worked out well, because in July I had just finished a new revision.

The upgrades are mostly quality-of-life: pullup resistors for the PWM inputs for the BLDC motors, better motor plugs (thanks to the JPL Open Source Rover project for that idea), and a power gate that requires the firmware to be up and running before the motors get power, so they don't spin on reboot. Plus general cleanup.

So, thanks to PCBWay for sponsoring the boards. We uploaded Gerbers for the 2-layer board on July 22 and had boards on the bench in San Antonio on July 31 - nine days door to door, including fab and international shipping, which I consider a great turnaround. While I'm here: I do recommend 2-layer boards for early prototypes like this one, because every trace stays on an outer layer and mistakes can be fixed with a simple cut-and-jump bodge wire. I already found one error of my own that needs exactly that, before the boards even arrived.

Quality was excellent, and one detail worth calling out is that the boards matched PCBWay's online Gerber viewer exactly. Checking the rendered Gerbers is a required step when I teach board design and layout, and it's only worth anything if the viewer is truthful about what will show up; in this case it was.

PCBWay provided the boards at no cost in exchange for an honest account of the experience, and this is it. But when I consider the time saved against routing a board in-house — which is how we normally do it here — I may be sending more business their way, if I can get the students to build that extra week into
their schedules. :)

Pics coming as soon as I get the rest of the components in.