{"id":543,"date":"2011-04-18T20:36:05","date_gmt":"2011-04-18T20:36:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beatseqr.com\/blog\/?p=543"},"modified":"2023-10-18T00:27:32","modified_gmt":"2023-10-18T00:27:32","slug":"beatseqr-4-5-is-alive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sc-fa.com\/blog\/beatseqr-4-5-is-alive\/","title":{"rendered":"beatseqr 4.5 is alive"},"content":{"rendered":"

The good news is that after I received my new boards, I was able to put one together and everything pretty much worked reasonably well. Well enough to use as demo units. \ud83d\ude42 So I have at least one more demo unit that I’ll be completing within the next month or so. <\/p>\n

\"beatseqr\n<\/p>\n

The not-entirely-bad news is that I did find some aspects of the board that I evaluated to be sub-optimal, so I’ve made a handful of changes and have submitted the design for manufacturing. I’m hoping to see those boards by the middle of next week. <\/p>\n

This was my first ever project using Eagle cad, and I’m feeling pretty good about it. The learning curve was ok for me. I don’t have any professional experience doing this stuff, so I guess Eagle is easy enough. It’s a little tough at the beginning, but once you get into the groove of getting your parts created in a library, you’re good to go. <\/p>\n

I pretty much took it as a given that I’d have some kind of critical bug or wiring error that I’d have to eat the costs of. The errors I found weren’t wiring problems, they were problems with drill sizes. All of the wiring was 100% accurate and functional. I ponied up for the autorouter, and I’m glad I did. I was able to move some things around on the layout, adjust some of the my fail-over pins and pads, re-run the autorouter, and was back to being in the fabrication queue with my board house within a couple of hours. Some people just don’t like eagle’s autorouter, but for me it’s awesome. I have something like 500 holes on my board and the autorouter did the job in about 2 minutes. Easily worth the cost. so I’m feeling like I can go ahead and work on the manufacturing optimizations I’ve been thinking about for pre-assembled units without having to worry about give up all of the hard work I put into the last functional layout. <\/p>\n

So, some highlights on this round of boards:<\/p>\n