NTP Server Progress Update
Just a brief update on the NTP Server project. The most recent revision of the board is starting to look good, and parts have been ordered, but not yet the PCB. What is being done at the moment is checking the scaling of the new parts against the PCB footprints on paper.
This is useful to just check before we order the PCBs that the parts we think match our PCB actually do. At this point it's cheap to change the PCB (since it hasn't been made yet), or order different parts. Once the PCB is actually made, there's a large cost sunk into it which is not recoverable - it either works or it doesn't.
There's a long list of changes for this revision, I'll post those when the PCB is ordered.
One more alarming part of this revision is the MCU appears to have tripped over some limit on CPU cycles before regulations involving WMDs start kicking in. No, I'm not making WMDs, but there are international treaties governing the movement of "high technology" that could be used in their creation.
Today was the first time I'd encountered that for any parts being ordered, and now I've had to sign documentation saying I'm honestly not building nukes, or biological weapons, or anything involved in delivering them. How strange.