X1Plus Expander aficionados,

I have been working tirelessly all weekend, and I come bearing good news, so I wanted to send you all an update and some photos. So, without further ado:

Testing Jigs Are Up And Running

There have been some very exciting shipments arriving at my desk this past week. On Friday, I finished doing the schematic and layout for the testing jig for the X1Plus Expander mainboard, and dutifully fabbed it out. Amazingly, on Tuesday, a box arrived from JLCPCB with five (mostly) assembled jigs! I grabbed whatever prototype mainboards I had lying around to check it out and started doing some board bring-up. A few hours later, it looked a little like this:

Then I decided I definitely needed an excuse to use the fancy label printer I got for this project, which looked a little like this:

Sample Production Boards Are Here

Then I got a text message from DHL. My contract manufacturer, King Credie, had finished production samples of the mainboard a week and a half early, and had dropped them in the mail for me.

Friday rolled around, and I tried anxiously to do some customer work while I waited for the DHL truck. Eventually, I gave up and went to take a shower and, while I was in the shower, there was a knock on the door: a box had arrived.

Friends, it looks amazing.

Later that night, I put the first board in the tester. It works! I printed a ceremonial label for it.

Note

The eagle-eyed will spot some glue over the power supply. I’ll talk more about that soon, either here or on the Hackaday page, but it’s not a real PVT sample unless there is some slight panic over something not quite working right! The short answer, for you nerds, is that a compensation capacitor needed to be changed on one of the buck converters, so we’ll actually be going to production on Rev. C03, which is just a population change — no metal changed, so it’s about as low-risk of a change as they come. And, for those of you who aren’t that kind of nerd, suffice to say that it’s fixed and the production version won’t need any glue!

Anyway, I just got through putting all ten sample boards through the tester. The yield was 100%! So I’m going to release all the units to production (gulp!) tomorrow afternoon once I’ve had one more chance to look over everything. Then, it’ll be time to put the panels together for the add-on boards and take final measurements to make sure the cases fit perfectly.

I had meant to get out my mirrorless camera and snap some nicer photos than I could get out of my iPhone but, gosh y’all, I am so tired. Maybe next time. For now, I’m calling this update a success.

Talk soon,
joshua