This was another PCB/panel that Forest Caver sent me. He’s slightly reworked the PCB from the original Mutable design to move the Recom voltage regulator to the back of the board rather than trying to squeeze it under the panel.
The panel was a nice black and white one, which I promptly customised with Sharpies!
The passive components on this build are all 0402 size. I’ve only gone as small as 0603 previously, so this was a new challenge; I can only just see 0402s, so hand soldering them by eye was tricky, but satisfying! Having completed all the SMD components, I was able to successfully flash the STM32 (or so I thought…).
Close up image of the 0402 passives with thumb for reference.
I added the mechanical parts and fired it up. To my dismay, it didn’t work at all. I spent a good few hours reflowing and checking voltages. Everything seemed correctly soldered and all my investigations were pointing to an issue with the STM32. I reflowed that a couple more times and still it didn’t work. I was just about to fire up the on-chip debugger to try and work out what was wrong, when I realised my error – I had flashed the Tides v1 firmware! I flashed the correct (v2) firmware and it all came to life. Calibration was easy enough, following Forest’s excellent guide. Looking forward to using it for a gig this weekend, where it will be modulating all the things…