Accomplishments

These least two weeks (the week before break and the break week), I finally sent out the orders for our PCBs to be manufactured, and then additionally sent out orders for all of the surface mounted PCB components from Digikey for each PCB. The original plan was to have both PCBs manufactured and assembled (having components placed for us), by PCBway. However, with shipping restrictions caused by tariffs we were forced to switch to JLCPCB. Therefore, I made changes to our PCB designs so that we could get cheap manufacturing from JLCPCB, but found out that with the new increase in tariff percentages getting assembly for our Kar PCB alone would incur $100 of purely tariff cost, which would wipe out the rest of our budget. As such, I changed the orders such that we are now purely paying for PCB manufacturing, and I will now perform all the assembly for the PCBs myself.

Progress/Schedule

The requirement for me to assemble the PCBs myself will undoubtedly have impacts on the schedule, not to mention the amount of delays encountered in actually ordering them. The one saving grace is that due to the PCB fabs not performing assembly, the PCBs will be delivered much quicker, meaning I can start assembly quite soon. Regardless, this will likely wipe out the time I had allocated for slack in my personal schedule.

Next Steps

Our PCBs will be delivered by EOD this coming Wednesday. As such, my plan for the coming week is to perform assembly on the PCBs and at minimum finish assembly for the glove PCB, and the finger attachment with the Adafruit board.