After several revisions - including several PCB layouts that were restarted from scratch - I've learned a lot about using KiCad.  I don't know for sure it's all going to work, but I feel confident enough to make the first revision of my board. If it comes back and the board doesn't work, I'll have new lessons to learn. Or if it does, I celebrate!

Off to OSH park!

They have a very KiCad-friendly pipeline that accepts the PCB data file directly, no file conversion or data export necessary. I was worried about file format compatibility since I am running the latest nightly build and OSH Park only officially supports the most recent stable build. Some people have reported issues, but in my case it seemed to have gone through successfully.

The OSH Park verification screen is a great confidence builder. They took my file and generated these images for me to look over. This is awesome! I can clearly tell that it is my design and it generally looks fine. The resolution is a little lower than I would have liked. It is starting to be difficult to make out individual traces on my board, it would obviously be impossible to do so on a large complex board. But I assume detailed checks are not the point, we just need to verify we haven't uploaded the wrong board and that nothing's fundamentally broken in OSH Park's interpretation of it.

OSH Park Verify

Upon checkout I was surprised that two Teensy boards were available as add-ons to my purchase. I don't know why the circuit board fabrication shop is selling their own edition of the Teensy board, but since I had been thinking about buying one to play with anyway, it was an easy impulse buy to add a Teensy LC to the basket.

And now I wait. The board should arrive in two weeks and I won't know what I need to fix in KiCad until I get the board and put it to (in)action. This puts a hold on the PIC micro controller hardware side of the project, and I can turn my attention to something else for a while.

(The work described in this blog post are publicly available on Github.)