The first uRADMonitor units were built by hand as prototypes, a time consuming task involving a lot of attention that often led to results of only satisfactory quality. Very frequently it was the PCBs that simply weren’t good enough when made by hand: defects were frequent and repairing them was nearly impossible.
Luckily the usual path for developing electronic projects, involves leaving behind prototyping and moving to production, and uRADMonitor is no exception here. These aspects were covered in some of the previous articles, on the aluminium enclosure manufacturing or the rubber gaskets used to seal the cases.
Finally the first professional PCBs have been manufactured, pending assembly, including mounting all the critical components. The tubes will be added last, due to their fragile nature.
The manufacturer is the Chinese company Lctech. They are very supportive so they get our thanks for their efforts.
Why didn’t you just put the ENC28J60 onto the board just as well?
Doesn’t that piggiback board increase costs without any goot reason? I mean you’ve got SMDs on there anyway so it’s no added cost/complexity in assembly. I agree that the ethernet jack’s height might make it a problem but there are low profile ones readily available and you seem to have designed your enclosure from scratch so i wonder if there is any reason for keeping things like sensors or the ethernet controller on piggibacks.
This was the best choice for the enclosure that I used.