[jytug]

Hi everyone!

Me and my friends decided to do a bulk order of 10 Tangara boards because we are all big believers in the project. I'm currently in the phase of trying to get the orders done right on the JLCPCB website (can't beat those first time discounts on the PCBs) and I have few questions surrounding this phase. 

Q1: I can't get the touchwheel cover to export correctly from KiCad into JLCPCB. I even downloaded the FabricationToolkit plugin which is supposed to do it exactly in the format the guys at JLCPCB want it in. When I texted customer support they said I didn't have a separate outline layer which I didn't really understand since the Edge.Cuts layer gets used for both the faceplate and mainboard correctly. Anyone else facing the same issue?

Q2: I can't decide between getting the whole mainboard assembled or just a single side, both of them seem to need interventions from the manufacture for either edge rails or tooling holes but I expect those won't interfere with the final shape of the board. I guess getting the mainboard fully assembled would come out the cheapest or atleast the easiest. I read in this thread that soldering on the QFN packaged ICs can cause issues so I was thinking i would get that side assembled and then hand solder the other one. How hard would it be to solder the components on the bottom of the mainboard?

Thanks for any tips!

From my experience:

q1) In KiCad go to "File > Fabrication Outputs > Gerbers" and click "Plot" and then "Generate Drill files". Then, zip all the gbr and drl files together and upload to JLCPCB. You might need to adjust the thickness on their website (for me it made it more expensive)


q2) I would recommend ordering the PCB with as many components presoldered as possible, unless you want to practice soldering. It's doable, it just gets old very quickly.

---

I'm trying to build my own Tangara, and while it's great fun, I seem to be a little stuck.

I think I correctly flashed the SAMD firmware (how do I know for sure?) and I can `picocom` into my ESP32. The firmware claims the following:

→ version
firmware-version=1.4.1
samd-version=6.0
collation=Generic
database-schema=10

I can run lua repl, but the issues I do see:

- The command `ls` only sees the storage after I flash it with tangara-companion (not after idf.py)
- The screen does not turn on in any way

The steps I've taken so far were:

- Solder everything
- Flash SAMD bootloader firmware with BMP (in the tangara-samd-bootloader it was build/zero/bootloader-zero-bc1632d.elf)
- Copy SAMD firmware from the official release here by mounting the ZEROsomething drive and pasting it there
- Build firmware and ifd.py flash
- Flash official firmware release with tangara companion


I'm thinking that since the screen doesn't power on, there must be a soldering problem (or ribbon cable problem), but I suppose I could have done something wrong to SAMD which after all manages power. Note that so far I haven't plugged the battery in.

I'd appreciate any hints! Thanks