Cathode boards arrived!

Today I received the cathode boards that I had ordered from OSH Park about two weeks ago. That's a lot faster then I thought it would be. Nice!

They came in a matching purple bubble envelope, the people at OSH Park seem to be really fond of purple :) They even threw in a sticker, awesome! I'll put it somewhere on the base of the cube I think, probably on the inside next to the boards ;)

The boards themselves look pretty much like how I thought they would be. The gold finish looks really nice. But I also noticed that the silkscreen isn't positioned as accurate as I thought it would be.

Here's the worst one, you can clearly see the silkscreen around the mounting holes being off center. At some points the silkscreen has been printed on the pads. Not that it matters that much, the biggest mistake is on my account. I have via's running through a bunch of pads. That's not going to make soldering any easier. I'm going to fix that before I order any more boards. I'm also going to have to do something about the component references, they're pretty much impossible to read for the smaller components because they either overlap with the footprint, or are clipped by the pads.

This one turned out really nice! I still have to trim the tabs; nothing a side cutter and a file can't fix. And I must say, it's really cool to hold something in your hands you designed yourself :)

I've also received a smd soldering practice board this week. I'll give that one a go before I start populating these boards :)