My first KiCad project was sent to OSH Park almost two weeks ago, and my digital design is now back in my hands in physical form. It is really quite exciting to hold in my hands a circuit board I designed. Three copies of it, in fact, as per usual OSH Park practice.

The first order of business is to check for simple mistakes. I pulled out my multimeter to verify that I have good connection between all the VCC pins to the VCC plane, and similarly all the ground pins are connected to the ground plane. Then I brought up my design in KiCad and checked continuity for the pins I designated. I don't know if I exhaustively checked them all, but a large portion were verified.

Once I'm satisfied my design has been faithfully produced by KiCad, it was time to pull out the soldering iron. I thought I'd do some incremental tests - solder a subset of components to verify the subset of LEDs light up correctly - but I was eager to see it all light up so I went ahead and populated the whole board. The legs of the 2N2222A transistors in their TO-92 package were closer together than I'm used to in my soldering projects, but other than that challenge it was all simple and straightforward soldering.

Populated LED board

And finally, the moment of truth. I was working in Tux-Lab and a bunch of nearby guys gathered around to see me power up the board for the first time.

<drum roll>

It's alive! The test pattern already programmed into the PIC started cycling through the LED display. This success is a great confidence-builder. I had fully expected to find problems with the board that I would have to fix in KiCad and send back to OSH Park for another set of circuit boards to be produced. The only problem I encountered was the PICkit 3 does not fit nicely alongside the power connector. I could make it work by making them wedge together at an angle. Neither were happy with it but it should be relatively rare to have the programmer attached.

Well, I guess break time from PIC software is over - I no longer have an excuse to play with other projects. The task of writing my I²C driver routine for this display is back on the to-do list.