I glanced out my home office window just now to see a bright yellow DHL van pulling up. After sending off my PCB designs to PCBWay they were estimating a Monday delivery, but could it be they'd arrive early this Friday? 

From the hero image above and the fact I've written this article, the answer was yes :)

After eagerly making my way through the well packaged PCBs I finally tore open the final plastic shrink wrap and was rewarded with the feeling of holding a printed circuit board design by my own design.

Wow

If you'd have told the teenage me that I would have been able to do this in ability, access to tooling and production facilities. Well, I would have been very excited about the future

The first sanity check was to ensure all the components lined up with their throughout points, which thankfully they all do

After work today I'll bust out the multimeter and check the continuity of the key connections before I go ahead and solder in sockets for the chips.

Once this is complete I'll hook it all up to my bench power supply whilst I run a series of tests, before I'm brave enough to put it into my precious 386 PC.