I finally committed to a new set of boards for a couple of projects. NTP Server 1.4 and the LUFA-based AVR programmer both have been sent off to be manufactured, and assembly should take place in a few weeks time. I'll separately post about the changes for the NTP Server.

The LUFA board is an quick prototype to see how badly I've misread the USB AVR datasheets. It is based off the hints provided in a readme associated with some LUFA code, and vague attempts to read the USB sections of the Mega 16U2 datasheets. It includes a level shifter to support 1.8 - 5V targets which covers all the useful ranges of both Mega and XMega MCUs.

I'm not sure how the little LUFA board is going to turn out, but it was fairly cheap to get made and I'm bound to learn something out of it as a result.

These are the first boards being made by Seeedstudio's Fusion PCB service, which for very short runs looks cheaper than previous options. It's only 10 boards (compared to the 25 or so I was getting from other runs) so it's more expensive per board but much cheaper to do a run because it's a smaller number of  boards. We'll see how they turn out.