THE BOARDS HAVE ARRIVED!!! JLC has finally delivered the boards and they look fantastic. But do they work? I will get to that shortly. Ordering the boards was a pain in the ass. When I added the boards to my cart and filled everything in, I got a price of 60 USD. I made my application for a grant for 60 USD and got accepted. Then when I later went to purchase the boards, I got hit with 11 USD of hidden taxes that JLC doesn’t show you until after you have already put you card information in and are ready to buy it. So I was 11 USD short to order my boards; so I made a support ticket on the slack to get my grant increased - just for it to get a couple (honestly useless) replies. So in desperation I looked to see if I could decrease the price to fit inside my grant budget and I was able to using a JLC coupon. So I purchased the boards and received an email asking me the orientation of the single IC that is on the board. They had the dot in the top right when it needed to be in the top left. I corrected them and even attached a screenshot from KiCad to further illustrate my point. They thanked me for correcting them and that was the end of it. Fast forward to yesterday and the boards arrived. I was filled with excitement and I hastily soldered on the headers to the board. I then went to test it with an esp32 and a simple vibe-coded (calm down it’s just for testing) esphome app. I wired everything up correctly and saw nothing on the I2C bus. I was scared I made a mistake but all the voltages and pins were where they were supposed to be. Then I noticed it, the IC was rotated 90 degrees from where it should have been; on all of the boards. It was in the original orientation that JLC sent me and not the corrected one that they confirmed. Even though I don’t have the correct tools for the job I attempted at fixing one. The one with the header already on it would have been annoying as I would have had to remove the headers which is a major pain in the ass. So I stuck another board on top of the hotplate that I got from hackclub blueprint and tried. The first attempt ended in destruction as I was using the wrong type of tweezers and so when I went to place the chip down it pinged off and knocked a capacitor and resistor off the board; and I chose to use absolutely tiny passives as the footprints in KiCad are incomprehensible and trying to compare them to LCSC parts was hard. On the third board and attempt I did (or at least I think I did as I don’t have a microscope to properly check it). I ran over to my computer to test it and I saw it on the I2C bus. Then esphome wasn’t letting me use it as a WiFi speaker so I played some rttti sounds on it and it worked! Of course all of this time was not logged (4-5~ hours of work) so what was the 1 hour and 25 mins. Well the original purpose for this board was to be used with Linux SBCs and so I tried to get it to work with the pi zero 2w. I picked the 2w to test with as it has 6.18 kernel which includes a driver for the es8311. However I know next to nothing about Linux embedded development, even though I’ve dail drove Linux on my pc for almost 2 years now - I know it more as a user than a developer. In other words, I couldn’t figure out how to properly write the device trees to get it to work and I couldn’t vibe-code it either as that didn’t work. Now I have to try and get this working on the pi before the end of Star dance so I can ship it. If you are reading this and have any experience in embedded Linux or device trees, please message me on slack: @pui4. Thanks for reading, I hope to get this done soon. Also I have sent an email complaining about the boards to JLC and I will report when I have any news.