These last days, I haven't worked on sound, but on my "secret project" instead. I won't tell much about it for the moment, just that it is now quite advanced, at least in my mind. I've designed a board, then unpacked most of the tools I bought some time ago to build PCBs on my own. Tonight, I made some PCB building attempts, and even if they failed, I'm quite satisfied with what I've already done.

This board is designed to use SMT components, and especially one packaged in LQFP48. This kind of board is probably not something that you can do with the usual amateur PCB building tools : the different sites I found on the web show examples of boards that use through-hole components. So I will probably have this board manufactured by some PCB prototyping company. But at least, I'm now a bit more familiar with the tools, and I'm now confident that they will be great for many other projects.

Well, if I want to have this board manufactured, I will have to change many things in its current design, that means many hours of work, then (usually) some weeks to wait for the board to come. So, once the design is done, I'll probably be back to my previous work (sound experiments) meanwhile.

EDIT : I will make some extra attempts with a different kind of paper. It may give better results on thin tracks.