On the non-toaster work front - that project with the little teeny board with the $2 MCU - the subsystem-level prototype boards came in today. Well, I got them today; the client got them yesterday.
One problem noted so far: my footprint for a 3.5mm pitch pluggable terminal block wasn't very good, and the headers ended up installed backward. Turns out that the easy way to reverse them (at least the 2-terminal ones) is to pry off the insulator and re-install, just leaving the pins soldered in place.
Other than that, one of the boards is working as far as I can tell, and the next needs some firmware written for it before it will do anything much but all three of the autonomous power supplies come up as they should, and the things that the MCU is supposed to control come up in their safe states, so all's well so far.
I guess over the holiday weekend I'll be writing enough of the firmware for the second board to get the essential functions working, and then proceeding to the third board (which depends on the first two, plus some Linux code) and the fourth (the tiny one, which runs the same firmware I've been working on while waiting for the boards to come in, except that it's a different model, so one module changes).
There's also some setting up to do on the test-fixture front. And... the final fixture needs to include one of Board A, one of Board B, eight of Board C, and one Linux SBC (various instances of Board D are optional). Also a bunch of cabling among them. Maybe I'll want to bolt all these buggers to a slab of wood. After all, the complete fixture needs to get handed off to the client's techies for their development, and having everything neatly organized might be better than trying to transport another Roger Amidon Spider.
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