New prototype is with the fab house

It took a while to finalise, but it's now in production!

We’re now live on Crowd Supply! Please head over there to register your interest.

I think I was actually ready to submit this a week ago, but I’ve been down a few rabbit holes investigating things.

I finally realised that I was just delaying sending the boards off due to fear of messing something up and losing a lot of time. And what I really needed to do was get the boards made so I can check that the new touch keyboard actually works.

The morning after submitting a board and realising you made a mistake…

So I bit the bullet and sent the boards off. There was a bit of back and forth as the buzzer I’m using had limited stock and somehow I had managed to pick the one slider switch that had zero stock. So I had to swap both those components out and redo a some of the PCB layout.

Here’s what we should get back in a few weeks…

I’m quite glad that I finally got the board off. I can now go back to these rabbit holes - which are mostly around the software and some interesting hardware options.

The “expansion port” opens up some exciting ideas - I’m going to be doing some experimenting to see what’s possible here, so keep tuned for more updates.

But, until the boards come back there’s not a lot to do apart from investigate firmware options. I would like to get the ESPectrum code working on my current board. I’m not sure how much hacking around I’ll have to do - but it should be possible.

I’ve also had a quick play with what a 3D printed case might look like. This would probably be left for people to print at home - I really don’t fancy getting into the 3D printing business.

I’ve not heard back from Crowd Supply yet - I’m starting to wonder if I really did submit the application. I’ll send it through again this week to make sure. I really must remember to make a copy of things I put into long application forms…

Don’t forget to share this post with anyone you think might be interested. And thanks for reading.