Minor Manufacturing Defect on the Arduino Uno
October 29, 2010 by spoonfork · Leave a Comment
[UPDATE 29/10/2010] The Arduino team has been kind enough to send me a replacement board. Thanks guys. This is a really great service from the Arduino team!
I got my hands on the new Arduino Uno last Thursday. Due to the Hard Hack Village at HITB2010KUL, I didn’t get a chance to play with until yesterday. The first thing I did was to test the LOLShield. The Uno lighted up all the LEDs except for the last two columns. I tested LOLshield with another board, and it worked fine. It was suspected that there might be something wrong with one of the digital pins. Sure enough, three pins weren’t soldered at all:
TX, RX and digital pin 2 were apparently not soldered. I proceeded to inspect the Uno closer now, and noticed a few things. There is a small leftover PCB on one of the edges, which looks like a small tooth. This seems to be the same issue as posted here. There is also a reddish orange color on the side of the board – again the same issue as reported here. Overall, this is a no biggie to me – the board works fine except for the 3 unsoldered pins. However, the most disappointing thing for me is the finishing. All but one side of the board are rough (the side on the picture above have smooth side surface and edge). They look like they were cut using knives instead of industrial grade PCB cutter. An Arduino Duemilanove that I have which was manufactured in China has excellent finishing, and the Uno has nothing like it. This is pretty disappointing since we at this part of the world have to fork out so much money to support a project that we love (1-to-1 at the exchange, EUR25 is way affordable, but RM100 after exchange rate is quite a fair bit of price). We understand that the Arduino project has been trying its best to provide the boards to the community as cheap as possible, and we appreciate it. However, bad finishings and unsoldered pins should not have gone unnoticed.
