BOM for Franky v1.1

Board is built, so this thread is not really of importance to me any longer. However, if anyone wants to reply it may be useful to others in the future.

That said, I noticed quite a few issues with this board. And think I may make a better manual for building it in the event anyone in the future decides to build the board. If so I will post a link here.

Meits,

I had several problems with his PCBs. First, the DE15 connector used was cut down. However, the pins where physically larger than the drill holes in the pads. To be clear, I am not referring to the stabilizing flanges to the right and left of the connector. I am referring to the actual pins of the connector itself. I ended up having to use my drill press and a PCB drill bit to open then up. Thankfully this only necessitated two jumpers, as there are only two traces that go to the top of the board.

The second issue that I had, again dealing with the drill holes in the pads, were with the Transistors. The drill holes are physically to small for standard transistor leads. When I brought this up to him, he basically told me the DE15 uses a standard DE15HD connector. I emailed him again to reiterate my issue, that email hasn't been responded to... Though I was able to make it work with some bodges after drilling the holes larger. This could have been a QC issue with the board manufacturer that he didn't catch with this run. But in my experience this is usually an issue with the gerber generation process. Either way the issue should have been caught before selling the boards.

In short, there are lots of issues with this PCB (that look to be possibly corrected on the Playsoniq card). I spent the weekend drawing up a schematic of the card. And I'm less than impressed. The build manual is incomplete, leaving out some fairly significant information on getting the card working correctly. Secondly, the transistors and their 120ohm resistors do not actually drive anything from what I can tell. Several resistor values should be changed to conform with the SMS schematic. Though, the card does work. I will say that...

To be honest, I'm halfway thinking of just laying out my own "compatible" board and ordering it for myself. An ethical dilemma, since it's technically his intellectual property. Especially since he did offer a deal on ordering several boards at once for people here in the States. However, after seeing these boards, the consensus was quality of the boards is subpar and the lack of any real customer service or technical information is disheartening... Mind you, every person in on this order has designed their own hardware. Though, as mentioned before, the Playsoniq card appears from it's pictures to be a well made card. I just feel that if you're going to sell PCBs, you should at least have a proper BOM to reference. Not to mention the build manual is a little lacking...