One of the boards that didn't make it
The Problem: Fabrication
First try: my bit got broken, so the board I was milling was spoiled. (and I was using a speed of 3 and depth of -0.1)
Second try: everything went fine at first, but apparently my board was not completely flat, so one corner did not got milled.
Third try: I came the next day again and started over. Adjusted everything, sent the file again, but the end mill didn't go up before starting cutting so I got a beautiful scratch on my board and another broken bit.
Fourth Try: At the fourth try, with a lot of help from Skylar, -because I just wanted to kick the Modela- everything worked out smoothly. There were still some little traces on my board that I had to get out with a knife, but it was very easy. I used the scratched board from the fourth try, so you can still see it in my current board.
My practice station at home
Stuffing Practice
For the stuffing, and since everything had gone wrong for the first part I decided to practice ahead. I made a little installation at home and run some trials with one of my uncut boards. In comparison soldering with a normal solder iron was harder than doing it with the ones in the arch lab, but it was a good practice, specially since I had never soldered anything so little before.
First stages of stuffing
Stuffing for real
On wednesday I went back to the shop and started soldering. Surprinsingly, the process went very smooth, and after about 3 hours everything was done.
My board (and it's war wound)
Finished board
Connected
Programming
On friday came the moment of truth. Would it work? We tried to programm it, with the help of James C., but it kept giving error 1. I went back to checking connections. I tried unsoldering SJ 2. Still, nothing happened. On the evening I re soldered SJ2 and tried again programming it with David Mellis's board, and... it worked! Then I unsoldered SJ 1 and plugged it into the computer. To make it work in the 64 bit computer we were using we had to install another driver that you can find here:
http://mightyohm.com/blog/2010/09/fixed-usbtinyisp-drivers-for-64-bit-windows-7/