The most recent hardware run I was involved in was a group buy for a custom keyboard that a few of us got together and ordered from JLCPCB [1]. This was a lot of fun and trivially easy to do: We didn't have to provide any parts. We just uploaded the design and had JLCPCB ship the partially assembled boards. It cost us next to nothing.
A project that I myself built end-to-end, from designing the schematics and manually laying out the 6-layer PCB on EaglePCB, to manually assembling the first couple prototypes, designing and 3D printing its enclosure, and doing a production run of 100 units was this one [2].
It was a tiny Linux box, only 18mm in width, built around an iMX233 (a 454MHz ARM9 CPU), with 64MiB of DRAM, Bluetooth / WiFi connectivity, a microSD slot, a microUSB port, and integrated battery charging. This was a ton of fun. I could SSH into it over WiFi!
The first pic was after applying paste with a stencil and placing all the components but before "baking" it; the second pic shows a working prototype; the third shows the board and battery in the enclosure; and the fourth shows some Shapeways 3D prints in various materials for it. I even had an aluminum version CNCed at Protolabs!
Again: I am a big fan of your Speccy project and I hope it gets funded. The 48K Speccy was the first "real" computer I was given as a kid and a have fond memories of it. That UV printed board looks awesome and I enjoyed reading your updates while you were working through getting the 40 keys to work independently.
The most recent hardware run I was involved in was a group buy for a custom keyboard that a few of us got together and ordered from JLCPCB [1]. This was a lot of fun and trivially easy to do: We didn't have to provide any parts. We just uploaded the design and had JLCPCB ship the partially assembled boards. It cost us next to nothing.
A project that I myself built end-to-end, from designing the schematics and manually laying out the 6-layer PCB on EaglePCB, to manually assembling the first couple prototypes, designing and 3D printing its enclosure, and doing a production run of 100 units was this one [2].
It was a tiny Linux box, only 18mm in width, built around an iMX233 (a 454MHz ARM9 CPU), with 64MiB of DRAM, Bluetooth / WiFi connectivity, a microSD slot, a microUSB port, and integrated battery charging. This was a ton of fun. I could SSH into it over WiFi!
The first pic was after applying paste with a stencil and placing all the components but before "baking" it; the second pic shows a working prototype; the third shows the board and battery in the enclosure; and the fourth shows some Shapeways 3D prints in various materials for it. I even had an aluminum version CNCed at Protolabs!
Again: I am a big fan of your Speccy project and I hope it gets funded. The 48K Speccy was the first "real" computer I was given as a kid and a have fond memories of it. That UV printed board looks awesome and I enjoyed reading your updates while you were working through getting the 40 keys to work independently.
[1] https://github.com/yanghu/unicorne
[2] https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1gw1cbw