Success with Pi substrate and 0.5mm spacing

[DavidYon47]

This is an early prototype of what will ultimately an Edison-based board. Once I get more code working on the Pi I will move the hat over to an Edison that has Sparkfun's Pi adaptor block stacked with a LiPo block, then work on getting a single board incorporating an Edison and LiPo support.

At the moment it's just the 5-way controller, Sharp MemoryLCD, and an ATTiny85 that supplies the display's refresh clock whilst reporting the value of Vcc to the Pi's serial port (eventually it will measure Vbatt and work as power management).

At any rate, the Pi substrate made layout and build much easier (nice to solder a connector to real plated holes). I managed to get a 0.5mm FPC connector onto the board, as well as getting the new solder wire to make solid joints for the button.

[jazozaya]

It's neat that you got the 0.5 mm connector on. Our recommended pitch is 0.65+ mm but I'm glad to see you ignored it

Are you using Eagle? If so - did you use the Raspberry Pi part that we made? If you have any feedback on the schematic or board that we can implement, please let us know.

Let us know how the project turns out!

[DavidYon47]

Yup, eagle. And 0.5mm was tricky. Might have been easier with your experimental nozzles as one of the biggest issues was the ink traces being too fat.

It would be nice to have a version of the Pi hat where the corner holes and camera slot were omitted as cutouts, and have them simply as top and bottom keepouts (the holes already are, but the slot isn't.

I simple removed them myself, then ran into the problem that I routed a trace over the camera slot (duh). I then had to guess where it was. Having a keepout would have eliminated that issue.

This may not affect most people, but for me, the OtherMill takes those holes and cutout seriously and attempts to mill them out. Which is at best a waste of time, at worst it will make them slightly larger if there is any alignment problem on the bed.