Murphy's Law

Here is a first post about the project I'm developing here during this year. I do help with other things but this is my assignment for the year. I have to redesign an electronic control board, because we are running out of spares, the original manufacturer no longer exists and some components used 10 years ago are obsolete and hard to find. The approach is to divide the board in different functional blocks and make prototypes of each block, to be tested alone.

After waiting more than 5 months for the components to arrive (some still haven't...) and after sending the prototype boards to manufacture in China (took less than a month and with some error correction in between), I started assembling, soldering and testing the first prototype board. As usual, it didn't work... After one day of despair and several blown fuses, I realized I had swapped two pins of one component. Result: I had to perform a destructive change in the board, scraping copper lines to eliminate the contacts and bridging them with wires. Yeah, way to go, problem solved! NOT! One other component was not generating the proper voltage. I had to remove it from the board to test it alone. A nightmare. 8 pins to desolder... After more than one hour and several 320ºC heatings, the component came out, together with the copper pads, the tracks and the tinned holes. I tested it alone and not working. Checked again and... Damn, I had swapped the pins again! That's my boy!! To put it back I had to add wires again, since the board had been locally destroyed. My beautiful board, manufactured by cute little 5-year old chinese children, is now a mess. But the board is finally working. Sometimes I think I should have taken another career...