
Some minor changes to this PCB
Balls – The PCB flexed waay too much to make a decent contact
I’ve now tweaked the board a little further,
Added just over 1mm on the J15 side to give a little more PCB substance to the area where the balls need to be clamped
Removed the resistor networks to set the brightness of the LED’s, I mistakenly used 33 Ohm Networks instead of 330 Ohm, so didn’t really get to chose the brightness by paralleling or serial-ing up resistors as planned. Instead, i’ve just bunged ‘about 500 ohm’ in all but the blue
Moved the headers around a little to account for different brands of JST connectors
Reduced further some hole sizes to experiment a little with fitting of jumpers,
Removed the on-board 3v3 generation as i’m now able to pull it directly off the Next!. This is only used for the ESP-01 re-location feature, and as a reference voltage for the I2c conversion so there’s no issues overloading anyone’s Next
And, finally, changed the EEPROM to a AT24C256C-SSHL-T.
Those last two have knocked nearly $3 off the total BOM for the board as both the old EEPROM and 3V3 LDO were extended parts, for which JLC adds a fixed cost as they’re not commonly used and require tape changes on the SMT machines.


Once these BETA boards arrive, i’ll quickly populate, test and send out.
IF these don’t work – i’ll be back to square 1 with that J15 connection method!