We had hoped PCBWay would start assembly of our boards shortly after the Chinese New Year, but concerns over coronavirus have delayed the factory reopening to Feb 17th – an additional delay of nearly three weeks. As such, we don’t expect be able to deliver the product until mid March to Crowd Supply. Which means the Signet HC should reach your hands around early April.

Software preparations

Our software work for Signet HC was originally on a separate branch on Github. We recently merged this work with the main branch and have released a new Signet client that is compatible with Signet HC and Signet. It detects which device is inserted by its USB vendor and product ID pair and enables different sets of features in the GUI.

If you already own a Signet you should consider transitioning to this client.

GNU/Linux users should pay attention to the fact that the udev rules file has changed: you will need to install the latest version for the client to recognize Signet HC.

Our Test Jig

To prepare to program the Signet HC units when they arrive we have created a test jig to make temporary electrical connections to the board. Our jig is a “bed of nails” jig where spring-loaded pogo pins are mounted to a platform and the board rests on the pins. A separate tool presses the board onto the pins to make a solid connection. We modeled our jig in FreeCad and printed it on our recently acquired Form2 printer. You can see the CAD model below:

The light green area is the test platform that supports the pins and board. The gray transparent board pushes down on the eMMC chip. You can see the final printed jig below:

To finish the assembly we added a little super glue to the platform legs and hot glued them to a wood platform. It’s crude but effective. You can see below how everything fits together when in use: