Book of Fail - Chapter II
Maybe this is a fail or not. Can go either way. The goal is to use an Ardunio micro to provide a USB keyboard HID interface for the Spacemouse keypad dock I'm working on. As I am exceedingly lazy and did not want to solder some 20 jumper wires onto a PCB protoboard, I forked out the dollars to manufacture a custom PCB from a fab house. Of course, the frieght charges dwarfed the few bucks for the board, but at least it was a satisfying design process. See if you can identify the issue I discovered when I went to program the board...
Ignore the tactile switch hanging off the board - that is just to reset it for programming and will be later removed.
Yep, that's correct - no space at all to plug in the USB cable!
How could I make such a mistake? Also seemed odd that the board did not perfectly fit the footprint I had expected, but it was close enough that it will do the job by leaving out a few pins.
Seems like the board is actually correctly designed and I had a BOM ordering issue. It is designed for an Ardunio Micro but had ordered a handful of Ardunio Promicros. Reasonably compatible pinouts but the usb port is on the other end of the board.
So much for this board - far too hard to unsolder everything so in the bin it goes I'd say. Luckily I have a few spares so I'll solder up another one but this time flip the headers to the other side of the board. As they are connecting to individual switches, the exact order does not matter the slightest.
It was really an ordering fail, not a design or build fail but with a bit of tweaking, it should turn out fine. Of course, we will ignore the fact that as I was soldering up the headers I thought to myself that I should be able to squeeze in a USB cable. Obviously was way short of firing neurons...
