Monday 22 April 2013

Fail fast, fail often...


It's a phrase that's bounded around the web an awful lot. At phenoptix there are only the two of us and most of the failing duties seem to fall on my shoulders, fortunately it would seem that I'm starting to get the knack of it!

Today a new batch of PCBs arrived, designed by yours truly late one evening maybe even with a beer on hand. Well at least I hope I had a beer on hand. The layout was completed fairly quickly as the badge PCB contains only a battery clip and an LED. Using KiCad it was a free and fast process, however the LED contained in the stock libraries only has solder pads on the top layer - this I managed to sort out with a few clicks before sending for production. The libraries are also lacking a CR2032 clip module. I set to work building the said module and got the polarity wrong - first mistake that made it to the finished board!

The idea behind this board was to make a striking badge with a nice shiny logo on it, so I set about emblazoning our logo not just in the silk screen but in the solder resist AND top copper layer. And so created the second problem in the final piece. I had bridged the connections of the LEDs in my fancy copper pour and managed to completely avoid pouring copper into the area that I wanted to make shiny. Bugger! The process of getting the logos into the copper and solder resist is a reasonably long winded but very satisfying one, check out Matt Little's blog for details (Matt is the fella behind our RGB Arduino board).

So what was the damage? 300 boards... all needing a touch with a dremel to undo the bridging and a little sticker placing to tell you to put the long leg on the LED into the other hole. Not too bad really, but considering the simplicity of the board I feel a little ashamed. I checked and checked before sending but next time I will check a little harder. 

What have I learned? Check the stock library parts for starters, if the PCB had been sent without the bottom solder pads they would be beyond fixing. Keep it simple (stupid), another cliche I know, but if I had been satisfied with the soldermask logo and had gone for a normal copper pour on the top layer the dremel work wouldn't need doing and the logo would be shiny in silver. Also I probably need to reach out a little more. There are plenty of folks I know that could have given the board a quick look over and saved me some time. That said, for the mistakes they look great and it gave me the excuse (if I ever needed it) to invest in the dremel drill press mount.

Riddled with errors (two errors for two components) but I think they still look rather nice! Very soon they'll be available in kit form from www.phenoptix.com

Wednesday 13 March 2013

Office Dogs - because we're a trendy start up!

It would seem to be all the rage to have office dogs. I only learned of the practice on hearing the sad news of Tatler's office dog Alan, who it would seem came to an unfortunate end on a chance meeting with a revolving door. Still we don't have a revolving door so I decided to get not just one but two dogs to improve life at The Workshop (that's what phenoptix international HQ is called). They seem to have settled in well enough! May I introduce you to Lilly and Dillon.


For the record they aren't really office dogs, they're my dogs, they live with me and my family at The House (I'm creative when it comes to naming spaces). They're having more time than usual with me at The Workshop as we're having some work done at The House, but I think we'll have them back at the office a bit more often as it's nice to have them around. 

Also I think a ball thrower should be added to the projects list, like the one that's doing the rounds on social media at the moment (I know it's an old video by the way as my wife and I have watched every Dachshund video on youtube). If you want to help feed the office dogs, buy some stuff from us at phenoptix.com

Thursday 7 March 2013

Acrylic Obsession.


What started as a request by the Hackspace for some prototyping plates turned into three solid days of obsession. 

Starting out with Oomlout's ubiquitous design (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:716) ubiquitous for a prototyping plate or sledge as some call them my first obsession was making something a little bit special for the folks at the hackspace. An epic etch!
These are epic as they take a long time on the laser as it rasters the image. I've got a small laser cutter and it can cut four at a time but four of these etches was just too intensive for the benefits, when you consider that an Arduino and a breadboard where going to be stuck over the top of this beauty. Also adding outlines to the front of the board caused it to look busy. So I tried a couple of other etches.
You can see our logo on there for the first time. It was suggested that the boards were dual branded for the Arduino event at Nottinghack, but really I'd done very little to the design to warrant our design on the board without attribution and besides with our logo being so small it looked busy and the etch was crap. An attribution was added and a mention that we cut them.

Triple branding! Adding an Arduino Uno and a breadboard to this I was kind of happy, it was as good as the Adafruit board I'd received a few years back in my ARDX kit. It's neat and compact but ever so slightly squashed. The next stage should have been to tile the design and cut out en mass from the the laser cutter. But two things stopped me. First was the wastage on my acrylic sheets. We use a 300 x 200 sheet as standard. As our supplier ships 600 x 200 sheets that we cut down to fit into our machine. Seems like a long way around but the guys we use supply cast acrylic, which is rarer and much much better quality than the cheap extruded stuff you see all over the interweb. Second, someone tweeted a picture of Adafruit's new ARDX kit. A picture perfect in almost every way! I suggested that the Arduino was the wrong way around on their board, but the reply was it could go either way! WHat?! An improvement?! Also their board was roomier, and as we had all the extra acrylic why wasn't ours? The next iteration awaited!
Reversible. Neat etches. Room around the edges and one brand in the middle. Sweet. Also in opposition to the epic etch of earlier these were quick as we were no longer rastering but cutting at low power. At least four times faster. Still could do with some pazazz. Enter fancy edge glow acrylic (and R2-D2)...

This version we loved and cut with aplomb. Lots of lovely colours were cracked out and we even used the DSLR for the first time in a while!
 
With enough cut for the Hackspace, happy with the work we rested. But then what? Wait? No? Why? Back in the depths of time, well November, we created the Pibow Proto Plate (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:35376), why hadn't this been incorporated into the design? A plate that could hold a Raspberry Pi would surely be of some use as well as an Arduino and as bonus be used with the Pibow. So here we are:
 
Again happy with the design, we move onto fancy acrylics
The result still owes a lot to the original design and it's great that it was provided under a licence where we can all benefit. Our design is also provided under the same licence so please copy, share and attribute. If you want a board but don't have a laser check out our listing here: http://www.phenoptix.com/products/arduino-prototyping-board-acrylic-plate-and-mounting-hardware or cut your own at your local hackspace.