Fabbing the Pebble boards

[Jonathan Oxer]

Hey party people,

I've been watching (mostly) silently from the sidelines while Luke has
applied his magic and with the assistance of many other people has
brought the Pebble design up to be a well-polished project. Now it's
time to get some of these suckers fabbed so we can do final checks of
assembly time with a variety of people and put together enough boards in
various states (bare, part-assembled, fully-assembled) for the miniconf.

I've run through Luke's generated Gerber files in gerbv and they look
sensible enough, so I'm going to submit a quote request to PCBcart right
now to get the process underway. That still gives a day or two for final
tweaks before the files are locked in for production, so if there are
any last minute changes to make (overlay changes to s/100K/10K/ for a
couple of parts, perhaps?) please speak up right now.

We also need to decide on a colour to use. Personally I've become quite
partial to the black-overlay-on-yellow-soldermask used for the PA
prototyping shields, but these aren't PA boards and since it's Luke's
baby he gets final say. PCBcart provide a bunch of colour options so if
there are opinions on that please say so, but I'll defer to Luke for the
final decision.

Cheers :-)
--
Jonathan Oxer
Ph +61 4 3851 6600
Practical Arduino <www.practicalarduino.com>
SuperHouse Automation <www.superhouse.tv>
Geek My Ride! <www.geekmyride.org>

[Vik Olliver]

On 23/11/09 Jonathan Oxer wrote:
> We also need to decide on a colour to use. Personally I've become
> quite partial to the black-overlay-on-yellow-soldermask used for the PA
> prototyping shields, but these aren't PA boards and since it's Luke's
> baby he gets final say. PCBcart provide a bunch of colour options so
> if there are opinions on that please say so, but I'll defer to Luke for
> the final decision.

Can we sneak a Tux into the artwork?

Vik :v)

[Luke Weston]

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As much as I'd like to, (a) I don't know how to include something like that in the artwork, and (b) it isn't a Linux related project per se... if it was an ARM board running Linux, or something like that, then Tux would be more appropriate :)

[Jonathan Oxer]

There's also the question of material thickness. Common PCB material is
1.6mm but for a small board that can seem very thick. The second batch
of PA ProtoShields was fabbed on 1.2mm material and I prefer it, but we
also have to consider that these may be handled a bit roughly by
beginners so maybe the extra rigidity of 1.6mm is justified.

If I was having these boards fabbed for my personal use I'd go 1.2mm,
but given the audience I'm leaning toward 1.6. For now I'm going to spec
1.6mm but if anyone has strong feelings either way please speak up.

[Jonathan Oxer]

On Sun, 2009-11-22 at 20:53 -0800, Luke Weston wrote:

> Colors? I don't know. I liked the black PA shields personally.
>
> Green just looks like your plain typical PCB - something markedly
> different would be nice. Red looks too much like another ubiquitous
> Sparkfun board :)
>
> Maybe black, blue or purple?

How about we try white? PCBcart list it as an option and I've been
wanting to try it ever since seeing the Seeed Studio boards. Black
overlay on white boards could look cool.

We also need to consider the overlay colour. For a black board we'd need
to pick a light overlay, of course.

Luke, what do you think?

[Jonathan Oxer]

OK, it's in. I've just paid for 100 Pebble PCBs + shipping to Melbourne,
so in the next day or so we'll need to supply the final Gerber files for
them to work from.

[Luke Weston]

OK, sounds good.

[Mitch Davis]

What are the thoughts about how to prevent the pebble from touching
the Arduino's USB connector?

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 5:58 PM, Luke Weston <reindeer...@gmail.com> wrote:
> OK, sounds good.

[Vik Olliver]

On 23/11/09 Jonathan Oxer wrote:

> If I was having these boards fabbed for my personal use I'd go 1.2mm,
> but given the audience I'm leaning toward 1.6. For now I'm going to
> spec 1.6mm but if anyone has strong feelings either way please speak up.

I think the thing that will give out is the adhesive between the copper
traces and the board as newbie solderers plunge in with great
enthusiasm. I wouldn't worry too much about the thickness.

Vik :v)

[Vik Olliver]

Mitch Davis wrote:
> What are the thoughts about how to prevent the pebble from touching
> the Arduino's USB connector?

Tape? Spacers? Generous wad of polymorph?

Vik :v)

[Andy Gelme]

hi All,

A piece of electrical tape works quite well ... and is neat.

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[Luke Weston]

Yeah, just pop a neat piece of tape on top of the USB connector.