Jeroen's Project Journals

So the PCB’s have arrived and I’ve started assembly of the first one. Here’s the progress after an hour or so of soldering:

Please ignore my soldering skills! It may not look pretty, but it does work. The wire with the black pad coming from the XIAO board is the self-adhesive antenna. This greatly increases the range of the XIAO wifi connection.

As per usual, I immediately found a few mistakes in the design. Most prominently, I completely forgot to break out the blower-fan feedback signal. This is due to me misreading the original heatermeter schematic. I also don’t know what I was thinking when I decided to combine the blower and servo signals in a single 4-pin connector, since both servo’s and fans have de-facto standard connectors which I should have used. Also, since factory-assembly of through-hole components is much more expensive than SMD it is better to use SMD electrolytic capacitors. So I quickly renamed the original design v0.9, and have already started incorporating these changes.

The current state of assembly is enough to start working on the software. I can attach a thermocouple, fan and servo and get at least a rudimentary application up and running.