Discipline 65

For my second board, I got a little more ambitious. I was keen to do more soldering and was drawn to the unique look of the Discipline 65, with it's internals laid out beautifully under an acrylic guard in an open-case design.

The official kit seemed to be perpetually out of stock at the time, so I took it upon myself to source the parts. (Yay for open-source!).

Assembling this board was a little less straightforward than the first one, owing to the increased complexity of the design, and one pesky little USB port that called for some drag soldering. Thanks to a pretty detailed build guide by CFTKB, nothing caught on fire (so far).

The brunt of my troubles came from flashing the blank ATMega32A chip that powered the board, but after a few hours of head scratching, environment reinstalling and Stack Overflow, my first completely DIY board was alive. All in all, it was a really fun build, and definitely brought my attention onto the hundreds of open-source designs out there. Again, pretty bad for my wallet, but sacrifices must be made in the name of progress!