Accomplishments

This week I first modified the Kar PCB shape to match the one that originally ships with the Kar. Now they have virtually identical footprints and mounting holes, meaning ours should be able to slot right onto the Kar. I also worked on getting quotes from various PCB manufacturers for the manufacturing and assembly of our custom PCBs. This led to me making many small adjustments to the PCB designs to hopefully secure lower quote prices, as we only have around $300 of our budget left. Currently, the quotes from the manufacturers total around $210, but we expect that to increase once the PCB designs and BOMs are reviewed; especially with the impact of current tariffs. As such, if the final quotes for the PCBs are too high I will make a couple more optimizations and/or forego assembly on the boards to drive the prices even lower, at the cost of extra bringup work in a couple of weeks. I also soldered some sensors which the team scavenged from various sources around campus for breadboard-level testing.

Progress/Schedule

The PCB ordering process is a little behind schedule due to delays in waiting for finalized quotes, but if they are received early within the next week I believe this to have a negligible impact on overall progress.

Next Steps

This coming week I will work on finalizing the quotes for the PCBs and getting them ordered. As stated, if the costs are too high, I will instead work on PCB reworks to bring manufacturing costs down: one proposed option is mounting our nucleo debug board on our Kar PCB to vastly simplify the PCB manufacturing requirements. Otherwise, I will be working with the rest of the team on breadboard-level implementation and debug testing in preparation for deployment of our code onto our PCBs.