Sesame

One of my most recent builds, the Sesame by Kb-elmo caught my eye as the weird lovechild between my two favorite boards - the through-hole Discipline65, and the Alice-like Arisu. After talking to kb-elmo, I decided to build a small batch of the Sesame, which was (at the time) still in it's early prototype phases.

The process of this build got pretty hands-on. As with the previous builds involving through-hole parts, the majority of the work overhead came from sourcing, checking and kitting out the individual electronic components needed for the build. Fortunately for me, they shared mostly similar parts with the previous Discipline and Dumbpad builds, so that was a lot of the work already done for me.

Like I said, we hopped in at a very early stage of the project, so the firmware was at the point where I had to compile it manually to be flashed. To make matters even more interesting, I didn't have the right pin headers for my AVR flasher, so I had to hard-solder the pins to the bottom side of the MCU housing, and use my one existing unit as a flash bench to get the firmware onto the remaining ATMega32A's.

Lastly came the interesting part. As with most early adopters, we also acted as bug testers. Turns out, there was a design flaw in the PCB traces that caused incorrect keypresses and shifts. Thanks to advice from kb-elmo, we managed to put a band-aid on it with a quick switch jump, and he assured me it was already fixed in future revisions. Interesting experience nonetheless.