Yesterday, despite the interference of a minor earthquake, I finished assembling a first draft of the Gado 2′s main control board. The board arrived from BatchPCB last week, and the parts came in from Digikey and Sparkfun on Monday.
Assembly was not too challenging. The parts count on the board is relatively low; the trickiest bits are the 0402 resistors and capacitors, which are like little grains of sand. This is my favorite image demonstrating their size; the thing sitting on Mr. Roosevelt’s nose is a single 0402 component. Look really close; it’s there!
Believe it or not, you really can solder these by hand. You just need a really nice iron, a good pair of hemostats, and some practice. Of course, in the final Gado 2 kit, all these things will come pre-assembled. But for prototyping, you have to do it yourself!
After about two hours of assembly, the board was complete. So far, there is only one major defect; the power jack’s polarity is reversed! Reversing the physical jack fixed that for testing; don’t worry, it’ll be the right way around in the final version! Here are some photos of the assembled board, sitting atop an Arduino Uno.
A bug/defect/feature list is provided here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13JN5zSeSZEFJM2aBW2lCVxxDEGdCsiY3CXTvMxJe3po/edit?hl=en_US
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