It has been a very busy month so far, but one of the highlights was getting an early adopter Pebble HF kit. Sadly other things seemed to pop up every day and delayed my beginning the assembly process.
At this point I’ve installed half the components, including the two toroids, which took as much time to strip the enamel insulation off as every other part installation combined. At this point I’m 45 minutes into the build.
The documentation provided by Mark and Becky is outstanding.
In the above photo you can see that the Pebble HF is a pretty simple kit to build. There are 21 total components in the assembly (as an early adopter I have to be able to reprogram the microcontroller, so there is an additional 6-pin header which won’t be needed when the final product is released).
No one should have any fear of winding the two toroids in the kits, I spent about 5 minutes winding the toroids.. One is 9 turns and the other is 7 turns, making it very easy to keep track of things. However it took me about 25 minutes to carefully strip the enamel insulation off the wires using a knife edge.
In the photo below, you can see that half of the soldered components have been installed. So far, it has been very quick and easy – about 15 minutes were required to get to this point, making a total of 45 minutes spent so far. I’m guessing less than a half-hour remains.
