Over the past month, we've been hustling *hard* to re-engineer The Public Radio's circuit design. We knew we needed to do this in order to transition to a digitally tuned FM IC, and budgeted enough time to go through two or three final prototyping rounds. The first round was the hardest - we wanted to be making as few changes as possible on the second, so balancing speed and accuracy this past few weeks has been a real challenge.
But it's coming together well, and we received our first development PCBs the other day. Our prototyping partner, Worthington Assembly, did all of the SMT components, and Zach added the thru-hole parts on Thursday.
We already found a few minor errors - two of our part footprints were a bit off - but they're all easily fixable and not an issue for working on the development boards.
Over the next week we'll be putting these through the ringer, and making any small changes we need to make the circuit fully optimized. Then we'll shrink the board back down to production size and will get one more prototype run built before placing our final orders.
More updates soon!