After gathering parts on Saturday and spending most of my Sunday operating the hot air gun, I’ve finally got the board finished! Save for 3 resistors and the right angle header pins I’m apparently out of. Sadly, the supplier I used mislabeled a few parts. It’s lucky I checked, because one of them was 196k instead of 19k.

QFN16 package (an ADC driver) was the hardest thing to solder, but so satisfying for that same reason. As far as I can tell, it’s properly soldered, despite being slightly off-center. Again, plenty of tented vias are visible. Their main purpose is to isolate this section of the board from the high power, high noise section above it.

The remaining 6 or so hours went to placing the passives, mainly spent sorting through parts, as I had a lot of spares and in one case, was still short by two. It goes without saying that 0603 passives are easy to misplace.

I think the final thing is quite nice. Ironically, every single through hole part was a major hassle to solder. It turns out, as I should have suspected, the BNC connectors make for great heat sinks and while the signal pin soldered fine, the chassis pins all had cold joints. I don’t imagine this will be an issue electrically, but they will be a little weaker. The screw terminals weren’t much better. They’re all rotated in some way and have cold joints. This is very far from what I wanted, but they don’t solder easily.

Either way, I look forward to testing this tomorrow, once I find the remaining parts and finish it off.