My circuit boards finally came in from the fabricators a few days ago. They’d been delayed and sent to the wrong address. Also, I’ve since made some slight changes to the circuit, but I was able to easily hack the board with a jumper wire to make it work.
Last night, I populated the board and wired up the pots, the switch and the jack. At this point it looks kind of like a mess of wires; this is my first circuit board design and I wasn’t too sure what was going on while I was doing it. Really all that matters is that I can fit the electronics into the cavity with no problems, and it does fit no prob. The next iteration will be much better, and for now, with 3 circuit boards running me about $7, I’m not sweating the costs or anything.
Next, I’m going to install a pickup I built a while back. I have some ceramic magnets on order from the fabricator, but they won’t ship until mid-October. Coupled with the fact that my original design used 16 small cylindrical magnets instead of 2 larger bar magnets, I’m going to have to make a few changes in my manufacturing process. In the end, I’m faced with a choice between installing the older neodymium magnet design today or waiting until mid-November for the newer ceramic design. The neodymium pickup sounds fine, but I prefer the character of the ceramic magnet design. I can just swap out the pickup when I finish with the improved design.