Good news everyone!

It's been a while since the last update. In the meantime, I've sent the new design off to different manufacturers and waited for the results to come back to me. Then, I received an email from Mike Szczys and started writing for Hackaday, the blog part of it. Then the results came back. Then, I threw them all in the trash. It was a pretty sobering experience. See the wall of fail at the end of the post for details.

Then, I got new quotes from new suppliers. Well, it's pre-production after all, and we're happily burning money on it. Better now than later. I finally found a manufacturer that delivered beautiful boards with an acceptable yield. From this preproduction run, I currently have 50 heated beds here for testing now. I still have to do a bit more testing on them, and if everything goes right, they will be available in the shop soon.

This is how they look like:

Wall of fail

The first series of boards (the red beta test units) came from DirtyPCBs. They were awesome. I think it's worth mentioning that. When they fail, then they fail bad, but most of the time, they are simply amazing. Not so the manufacturers I tried afterwards. All of them had higher per-board prices, and all of them sucked hard. Some arrived with the Gerbers entirely misinterpreted (and yes, I quadruplechecked them), some had a weird flaky soldermask, and some just arrived virtually without packing and took serious damage. Here are some excerpts.

Packing fail

Gerbers WTF

Black marker FTW

These spots are quite common, although some runs had 50% yield due to these.