PCB Order Arrived!

[Originally Posted December 15, 2011]

So after anxiously waiting a couple of weeks. Batch PCB came through and for whatever reason gave me not one, but 2 of each board that I ordered!  I ordered 7 boards and have 14 PCB's laying on my desk. Fantastic! 

So, we have all the boards I mentioned in the previous post here. From left to right:  4550 DevBoard, Joypad Shield, Graphical LCD Board, Stepper Motor Board, Current-Sense Board, Screw-terminal Breakout Board, and the Character LCD Boards.

I didn't have a tape measure handy to give a proper measure of scale here (wooden desk doesnt lend itself well to that either). So I placed a Hot Wheels (70' AAR 'Cuda) Behind a couple of the board to help give some sense of scale. 

Character LCD PCB (~2x2")

Above is the PCB I'm going to use to interface with the character LCD I have. The breadboard version worked well so Hopefully this version will work just as well in a smaller package.  

Now, the image below here is the current sense ones, which are interesting for 2 reasons. Firstly, the sensor itself is rated for 100Amps (One-Hundred!). So the planes that I put around the top and bottom layers of the pads are actually connected. Doing some crude trace-width calculations it looks like the traces should be able to handle 15-20amps without an issue. If I do some solder bridging (which I probably will) that number will go way up. 

The other thing that's interesting to note for future projects is that the current sensor has slotted leads! This would've been a problem because the leads are ~1cm wide and no PCB fab house will run a drill that big. Plus that would leave me with a massively large hole where my little slot should be. Solution? Lots of drill holes the thickness that I needed (0.8mm). I think 8 drills in all. But this was great because we see that batch PCB still plated everything properly. So the slots that they say they *Don't* support they really do, with some manipulation.  So if you're looking for some slotted holes it can be done (Also the new Eagle V6 looks like it can help you a lot more than it did for me with these boards). 

Current Sense and Negative Voltage Reference PCB's

I'm heading out tomorrow and hopefully I'll get time to solder some of these guys together. I don't have parts for all of them but if I can even just get the 2 LCD ones soldered together I'll be pretty happy. 

Regardless I have a lot of free time soon and hopefully even more projects like this coming through!