PCB Modules

Playing catch up again...  The PCBs arrived from Germany on August 21st, professional and practically perfect. Somehow the 'T' in Styra didn't show up, but the design for the electronics printed out just as it should. The boards were assembled and tested in short order and prototyping work is well under way. Before we jump into the prototyping work, I wanted to show off the beautiful printed circuit boards from Fritzing!

Figure 1: 32 input shield for Mini-PAC

Figure 2: 16 input module (version 2)

Figure 3: 16 input module (version 3)

Figure 4:  $250 worth of printed circuit boards

I ordered these boards through the Fritzing project from Germany. I paid a little more for shipping than I would have if I had ordered the boards from a fab in the US, but they were able to process the native Fritzing file format AND part of the proceeds goes to fund further development of the open source Fritzing development environment. I only ordered a total of eight boards, but they included an extra board of each design without any additional charge. The boards turned out beautifully.

Figure 5:  Assembled 16 input module (version 2) 

The fully assembled through-hole version of the 16 input PCB module shown in figure 5 was easy to put together and only required about 25 minutes each to assemble.

Figure 6:  Assembled 16 input module (version 3)

The fully assembled surface-mount version shown in figure 6 required nearly 45 minutes to assemble due to the amount of time I spent checking and double checking the solder connections. Both versions work exceptionally well and they both can be used interchangeably (and simultaneously) in keyboard prototypes. The four pin headers in the lower left of the PCBs allow up to 8 input modules to be daisy-chained together, providing up to 128 button inputs for a single keyboard.

The first batch of Styra 16 input modules is ready for integration into prototypes!  :)