K3NG Arduino CW Keyer K5BCQ Board Build Part III

 Following along the build instructions from the K5BCQ website on page 5 it mentions that if you are going to build all of the modules for the K5BCQ then group components together starting with the smallest ones and build up from there. See I can read, so that means that I made it past 4th grade. Those were the best three years of my life I tell you. 

Since that is my plan I will start off with the resistors and go from there. Now I'm not going to show you every single resistor that I solder on the board. I will save you and myself a lot of time and just show you the K5BCQ board with all of the resistors soldered on. Just make sure that you are using all 1/4 watt resistors and keep them as close to the board as possible. It adds an additional step but I recommend that you check the value of each resistor with your handy dandy digital multi-meter. It is always wise to go slow and be correct. Once you have soldered both leads on, trim them close to the board so that they are kept nice and neat. 

I'm going to take a little bit of a break right here. I don't have some resistors so I had to take inventory and go on over to Digikey and place an order and now I wait for the resistors to come in. I also ordered C4 the 100uF electrolytic capacitor and that is on backorder so it could be a wait of a week or two before I get it.  

When I populate a PCB board one thing I like to do is to get a map of the PCB board and mark each and every component on the map as I install the components. Here is a picture of the map of components that I have installed on the PCB board. Since this is an electronic picture I'm just using a yellow line to mark what has been installed. 

I also have the headers for the Arduino Mega 2560 Pro Mini installed on the bottom side of the PCB board. 

Here is a picture of the actual PCB board so far. 

That is the progress so far. Feel free to contact me at Aaron@K5ATG.com