Feedback on assembling

[josephmlev]

Hello,

This is less an issue and more my experience with a few things. I would be happy to change any or all of them via pull request if appropriate.

Overall, this was a very smooth build and I am very grateful to the community for resources like these! I'm probably a total of 10 hours in for a working board with all 4 outputs tested. I still have some testing to do, but that would be required regardless.

• Putting together a cart was a bit slow, and could mostly be solved by including a CSV of a digikey cart. As parts go out of stock over the years, it will become less and less helpful if no one maintains it, but it's a good starting point. I'm happy to add mine.

• I had my PCBs made by Oshpark. They allowed me to save as a shareable project. This would be helpful to someone who doesn't know what a gerber is, although they may want to learn if they are going to build projects like this ;) Same longevity caveat as above. project here. I also did this for a prawndo breakout here

• I found the screenshots of the schematic and PCB layout to be very helpful since I didn't have kicad on the machine near my solder station or where I ended up testing the board. I have already submitted a pull request to add them to the README.

• Related, I really like the kicad feature where it can export a BOM as interactive HTML. This is the first time I used it. I would add that file to the repo. See attached:

ibom (3).html

• I think optional LEDs on inputs and outputs would be very handy. They could be disabled with a switch or omitted. It would require more testing than I am prepared to do in the near future, but I wish I thought of this before ordering the PCBs.

• The jumper positions could be more clearly labeled on the silkscreen.

• Adding an orientation mark for the output buffer to the silkscreen would be very helpful!

• A photo of a finished board would be cool!

Thanks again, and no pressure to include any of this.
Joseph

[dihm]

Thank you for putting together this list! I'd say all of these things would be significant improvements and we'd certainly appreciate any and all help you could provide to those ends. As you've no doubt noticed, this project (and the state we've left it in) very much reflect how we handle fab (ie we do it ourselves with mills on single sided PCBs without a silk screen or solder mask). I only have a few comments/suggestions:

• A BoM is a great idea. I vaguely recall I may have added some digikey links into the BoM in the KiCAD project, but I may be making that up. Regardless, I would like to keep things as unified as possible, so I'd suggest populating the BoM in KiCAD, then using it to export a CSV for simpler consumption by end users.
• The shareable projects are great! Though I agree with you that odds are they will rot away fairly quickly. I'd suggest making a Discussion post to put links like that. I am realizing I haven't enabled discussions on these repos though, so I'll go ahead and enable them. Anyway, putting that info in a discussion makes it easier for non-owners/non-git folks to contribute and maintain them, while also making it a little more clear that they aren't guaranteed to work (since they aren't in official docs or anything).
• The HTML BoM is amazing! I didn't know that was a thing. Another great tool to export from KiCAD and commit to the project.
• I'm not sure I totally understand what you mean by LEDs on the inputs and outputs. Are these LEDs powered by a separate pin on the pico (to indicate what channels are in use) or are the LEDs tied to the actual inputs/outputs somehow. The former is an interesting idea (though I don't know when we'd get to it either). Not so sure about the latter.

Again, if you want to tackle some of these, I'm happy to benefit from it! If not, I'm hoping to have a summer student this year who should be able to take on some of these (including a demo/validation notebook that provides better automation for confirming operation; lacking it makes it harder to get up and running to fix a bug and makes it harder for new users to get started as well).