Parallella-RF Build

[hewittc]

Hi all,

Andreas was kind enough to send me a couple Parallella-RF boards. I just finished sourcing all the parts for the build and will populate the boards soon. The only somewhat difficult to obtain parts are the Rakon VCTXCOs, which require conferring with a sales person at Rakon. They do provide engineering samples, however. It also looked like the green LEDs were end of life and not available from element14 but I found some yellow LEDs from the same family that were in stock and I bought the last four in stock.



Consider this thread as a build log and journal for the board bring-up!

Christopher

[hewittc]

Here are the results of my first attempt with using a solder stencil and getting into a project without proper magnification. Currently most of the back of the board is completed. I think it turned out alright. The front has fewer parts and will hopefully take less time to place.









I dropped my camera into the solder paste and lost some of the definition around the resistor arrays as well as the Samtec connectors. I just wiped off the paste around the Samtec connectors for now. The hot air nozzle I used also seemed to make three of the smaller components stand on end. I'll patch those up once I have a proper stereoscopic microscope to work with. If you plan to do this yourself, it's probably not the best idea to pick and place at 3:30 in the morning.