After a short hiatus on developing Borealis to focus my efforts on my consulting start-up, I picked up Borealis, and developed another revision of its PCB. The third and hopefully final (pending further tests) revision of it arrived today, produced once more by the great folks over at Seeed Studio. I spent an hour hand-soldering the components, which turned out relative neat and professional.
Some of these capacitors tombstoned during hot-air soldering, and required rework.
Flux cleaned up nicely with isopropyl alcohol.
PCB Display
Top quality PCB production meets an elegant white solder mask, which allows the LED light to refract better.
AVR and Connectivity
I integrated a custom programming interface to burn a bootloader with, and moved the bluetooth module closer to the AVR. Again, I used the atmega32u4, but I’m undecided if I should use it or the atmega328p in later crowdfunding production.
What next?
I wanted to get this up and running tonight, however, the Arduino-as-ISP I had used for the first & second revisions was unresponsive and wouldn’t sync correctly with the board. I ordered a proper USB-ASP from eBay, and when it arrives, I will burn the bootloader, then upload the code (which is an upshot of using Atmel’s 32u4: the latter can be accomplished over USB, by either myself, or a tinkering end-user)