Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
(Source: Image CC-BY-SA ThingM Corp/Tod E. Kurt)
Figure 13.6
An early ThingM BlinkM. Note the two hand-drawn dots below “PWR.”
A more direct example of suck-muck is the early version of the SparkFun 9DOF (9
Degrees of Freedom) board. The board design was sent off to production with a gap
between the ground connections in the design. Throwing boards away is never an appeal-
ing option, so SparkFun engineers came up with a simple fix that let them avoid the extra
costs and time required to manufacture a new batch of boards. They were able to solder a
jumper wire between two ground connections to complete the circuit (
Figure 13.7
). Manu-
ally soldering this jumper wire required the time of a paid technician, but it was still less
expensive than scrapping the entire production run, and it enabled SparkFun to avoid a
6-week delay of the product launch.
