I’ve made a few changes to the PCB, and I’m ready to order first production run of 100. But, from where? Here’s my cost comparison on several different vendors I sent this incomplete-but-correctly-sized set of gerber files:

I’m going to go with jetpcb: they’ve been quite responsive, and their quote includes full electrical testing as well as scoring of the different PCBs for easy separation. Total price is $464 for 100 sets of boards (2 relay breakouts, 1 main growerbot board, 1 lcd board, and 1 encoder breakout); our boards should be here by the end of next week!

From there, I’ve got the following left to do:

• Attach surface mount components
• Finish enclosure design
• Complete software development, testing

Hopefully this saves some of you time on your own electronics projects. Any competitive vendors I missed?

We’re not there, but we’re getting quite close!

These 2 photos may look quite boring, but they contain some exciting news:

That’s the growerbot running the Blink arduino example. I uploaded the code on an Arduino Uno, placed the ATMEGA328 in the growerbot, and we were good to go. Of course, there were some ‘green wire’ fixes:

This is exciting because it confirms that we’ve got basic Arduino functionality occurring on the standalone growerbot. Much more testing over the next week (probes, electric imp, etc.), and then I should be ready to order the first production run.

Here are some more photos of the boards:

When it’s ready, I’ll publish the gerber files for everybody to play with. Thanks for your patience!

Have arrived!

Here’s what they look like:

And here’s a close-up with some components inserted:

I’ll get everything attached and run some other testing this week. If all goes well, I’ll order a bulk run to fill all the Kickstarter orders. We’re getting close!