Ramps Boards August 30 2013, 2 Comments

Hi everyone,

So last week, we received our 1st batch of electronics from our overseas suppliers. We had ordered a batch of ramps boards for our early bird backers, even before we received the funds from KS. The purpose of this is to be able to:

1) establish trust between us and the factory

2) determine their defect rate

3) be assured that we have more than enough boards for the early backers

4) establish a test procedure that we can use for the succeeding batches

We decided to order 10 more boards as buffer in case there is a >30% defect rate, which we think is conservative enough.

Here's a pic of the boards fresh from the factory:

We discovered that the header pins were missing, so we had to manually solder the header pins ourselves. It was quite tedious and took up most of our time. We contacted the factory about this, and they agreed to install the headers for the next batches for a few more cents per board. We were only able to test a few, but so far so good.. It looks like the factory is trust worthy enough for our next order: the heat beds.

 P.S. these pics were taken at OCGT. (http://www.meetup.com/OC-Garage-Tinkerers/)