Building, week 1

In which buying a bGeigee in Europe is not cheap, and the build start

After two solid weeks of waiting, the kit came by UPS. With a nasty surprise. I didn't realized at the time, but you have to add value added taxes (VAT) to the total value of the package. With import taxes and insurance, I paid an extra 93.03£.

This bring the grand total to $700*, instead of the $450 announced on Amazon. We definitely need to source the parts in Europe.


Flash-forward a few month later, when I finally found time to pay a visit to Leed Hackspace.
As usual, visitors are warmly welcomed on Tuesday night, which is open night. And it was pretty busy.

For the built, I simply follow the excellent bGeigee Nano manual wiki on GitHub.
After checking that all the parts were in the kit (indeed they were) and trying to understand how the different parts where supposed to fit, I started implanting the basic components on the main board, before soldering them all in one pass, as recommended.
Here's the look of things at this stage.

I then proceeded to the soldering bench for a rehearsing crash course taught by the super-helpful Paul (thanks again), and onwards to soldering the basic components as well as the headers.
The whole thing took me about 3 hours, which is more or less what I expected.

Next, I will have to add the breakouts: Arduino, GPS, LCD, SD card reader, but that will be next week. Meanwhile, here's a picture of the studio's new 3D printer during a test run. One of the resident is currently building it.

* that is 450£, or 565€