Sorry for the lack of updates but there hasn’t been much spare time recently. Currently the chess piece PCBs are being made, next will be the baseboard which is being redesigned. Instead of one large board – which was impressive but not very practical, a single manufacturing failure would mean scrapping the whole board – I’m going for a modular approach…
The new design will be made up from either 4 or 8 independent boards which can be assembled and tested on their own. Faultfinding on a 14×14 inch board with 64 driver circiuts, even with resistors to isolate sections, was never going to be fun and it was clumsy to handle when assembling. It seemed a good idea to make the base board rigid but it actually tends to bend and adds nothing to the stability of the case. The new design will add a couple of pounds to the component cost but savings in time, hassle and rejects should be more than enough to cover it.