Hardware Update #1 — Boards Away

By Thomas Lövskog
1 min read

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After a focused design sprint over the holidays, the first revision of the Voyager-inspired calculator PCB is done and the Gerbers are submitted. Manufacturing is underway at JLCPCB.

The board is a dense little thing — fitting an STM32U599, 16 MB of flash, USB Type-C power and data, a microSD slot, battery charging, an FPC connector for the 240 × 960 display, an 11 × 5 keyboard matrix, a MEMS accelerometer, RGB status LEDs, a buzzer, and an expansion header into a form factor only marginally larger than an original HP Voyager is not a lot of elbow room. Altium Designer handled the layout, and getting the impedance-controlled USB traces and the FPC routing right in the available space took a few iterations.

I Usually use either a local board fabricator here in Sweden or JLCPCB for my boards. The local fabricator for price and speed, but htey dont do IPC Type VII vias (plugged and capped) nor the really dense boards with 100µm L/S or 0.35mm-0.45mm vias.

JLCPCB are also doing my larger VIC NX boards. A 6-layer, plugged and capped with a extremely cost competitive price.

Two boards are on order. The plan is to bring up one and keep the second as a backup — first spins rarely come back without something to fix, and having a spare means the project doesn't stall waiting for a respin while debugging.

Updates when the boards arrive.

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Last Update: March 01, 2026

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