Part 4 of 4 — Building a HackerSpace Badge · Previous: Designing the Badge in KiCad

This was my first time ever ordering a real PCB, so getting the badge from my screen to a factory was its own small adventure. Exporting the Gerber files, the manufacturing files a board house actually needs, was the fiddliest part of the whole thing. Once I had those sorted, uploading them to JLCPCB was smooth. I ordered twenty of them in black, more than I needed, because I was already excited about handing them out. Then I hit order and felt pretty proud of myself.

That pride lasted until the next morning. The thought I had taken to bed with me was still sitting there, so I opened the project back up and went looking for it. The collector of the transistor didn’t tie to VCC. Classic. That transistor is what drives the LEDs, so with no power reaching it the fade could never actually run.

I went straight to JLCPCB to see whether I could still swap the files out. I could not. The board was already in production. It had not waited around for me to have second thoughts.

What still bothers me is that the design rule check never said a word about it. The only thing it flagged was silkscreen, which I waved off. DRC checks the board against the schematic. If the schematic is missing a connection, then so is the board, and there is nothing for the check to flag. It was doing exactly what it was supposed to do. I just handed it the wrong drawing to check against.

So my first set of badges will ship with a small bodge wire, a short wire you add by hand to fix a mistake on an already-made board. I’ve since corrected the schematic for the next run, and that fixed version is the one I showed back in Part 2. Honestly I can laugh about it. A bodge wire is practically a rite of passage.

Once the badges come in, I’ll show them to the others at Bit Haven to see what they think and what they’d change. I might even walk someone through what I did so they can make their own changes to the design.

This is the board I sent to the factory. Every one of them will need that extra wire.

The lesson I’m taking with me: sleep on it before you hit send.