LayerOne Badges Stop Bullets; Drive Away

We love badges. And we’ve really got to thank [Charliex] for taking the time to write a huge post about this year’s LayerOne badges, especially since they’ve got their backs up against the deadline for pulling everything together in time.

Here it is, the stock badge on the left, with an add-on shield on the right. Now the original intent was to make this badge the chassis of an RC car. [Charliex] chewed through his development time trying to source toy cars that could be gutted for parts that would mount easily on the badge. This looked promising at first, but turned out to be folly. Instead what we have here is an Arduino compatible board with an RF transmitter which can be cut off and used separately if you wish. Attendees will be able to use the badge to take control of the toy cars (cases of them have been shipped to the conference), with the option to use the USB functionality to facilitate automation.

So what about stopping bullets? There is a bug in the module [Charliex] used to export the board design from Eagle. They came back from the fab house as 0.125″ substrate. That’s pretty beefy!

The conference is this weekend… better get on that!

13 thoughts on “LayerOne Badges Stop Bullets; Drive Away

  1. Hahaha! That’s a thick board! They use that thickness board for the SAS connectors behind some ruggedized RAID enclosures. The drives get slammed in pretty hard by the Oaf’s…er…I mean Marines that use the equipment.

  2. Almost 100% sure that Gerber files don’t include a PCB thickness specification. That’s usually something you discuss with the PCB manufacturer during the purchasing phase, along with soldermask color, lead or no lead, gold flash, etc.

    1. Gerber files do not have a thickness, but in Eagle there is a button that lets you transfer parameters to the element14.com web site, then you pick a service, quick turn off shore, etc. The bug is when you click ‘get a quote’ it transfers you to pentalogix.com and the default board thickness set by default at element14.com is changed to .125″ from .0602″

      if the gerber files did have a thickness parameter it might have been saved.

      1. Guess I should be glad my version of Eagle doesn’t have that button, I guess. I did buy it before element14 bought Cadsoft, and they won’t upgrade me to 6 without a few hundred more bucks, but maybe the button isn’t in the Professional version of Eagle 6 either?

    2. This is one reason why you should have a “FAB” layer gerber that calls out text notes or sketches for things like the layer stack-up order, total thickness, copper plating thickness (1oz, 2oz), finish type(leaded, lead free, gold immersion, etc.), all that good stuff you select when you get the boards quotes made. Any decent board house will look at that “FAB” layer gerber and contact you if there are any discrepancies with the web order info.

      1. Pretty much, though every time we add one another thing to the checklist of things to check something else crops up to add to the list, including, check the list, its getting long. This is our first offshore run with these guys, and the prototypes were fine.

        as they say, first time for everything.

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