More ordering, waiting, soldering stuff.

I have begun soldering rows of header pins to the boards for the IO expansion as well as a few sensor boards. The PIC32 IO Expansion board does not have any of the IO pins installed when you buy one. It only has the two card edge connector sockets. I’ve gotten them all soldered on now and am waiting for an order to come from SparkFun for a few more sensors.

The fun thing with SparkFun appears to be they suck at shipping. I ordered something Monday night. Tuesday one would expect them to process it. Wednesday I received an email indicating my order had shipped. Wednesday night the carrier had no record of the shipment. Thursday they claimed to have been electronically notified of a shipment but had not scanned it so they may or may not have it in transit. It COULD BE at SparkFun still OR it could be in transit. Friday came and went. The shipping method I chose I researched and it takes a guaranteed 2 days to arrive where I live. They DO deliver on Saturday. Nothing came today. The tracking info STILL says that electronic info has been received.

Soooo it’s now 5 business days into ordering. I’m going to be really pissed off if they havent shipped it yet and it’s just sitting around packaged and labeled and not handed over for delivery yet. On Monday I’m supposed to get the infrared pre-heater in and some solder paste for smd stuff.

Regarding the time experiment it appears there is a drift of a second every couple of hours. It is close enough for a normal roast use but several hours later you can see a 1 second different. If I want the time to track continuously it needs some adjustments. Once I get a few things dealt with I’m going to confirm the quality of the solder joints using some of the rework soldering stuff and clean some things up first and then try a different combination of crystal and capacitors for good measure if it doesnt help resoldering things like that for a good connection.

I need to get some spray (or paint on) flux remover for the board and some brushes to clean it up better…. also my stuff that’s supposed to be here Monday has disappeared from UPS’s website. It now shows billing information received. I’m guessing the sender re-uploaded my tracking stuff with a new order he shipped resetting my tracking back to zero. Until they scan it somewhere else along the way it won’t show up probably.

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