As mentioned some of the items had later ship dates than others. As of June 16th I have received the IO board, the prototype boards, the LCD graphics w/LCD kit, and a power supply.
In addition to the development kit I have on order a few engineering samples for a few parts to test out before I pick vendors to program things based on and start purchasing real parts. These engineering samples will be mounted on “prototyping” boards that will either be custom built or ordered off the internet pre-made. Occasionally chips are used in a variety of ways so I will simply build a board to solder them down to and install pin headers to attach to on the board. These will also serve as “test” printed circuit boards as I learn to make boards on my own.
The ones I have received so far are a chip that has a real time clock/calendar in it and a chip that reads temperatures from a thermocouple probe. I still have requests out for a few ambient air temperature sensors and a few other things that will be used in additional projects that will eventually connect to/from the roaster computer.
The surprising part is that the clock chip is more or less around the size I expected (about guy little/pinky finger nail sized) BUT that the temperature chip is significantly smaller than I expected. It’s REALLY small. It’s so small that you could literally put at LEAST 16 of them on top of a single computer laptop keyboard key.
I am still waiting for the “brain” starter kit to arrive. This is where things get funky. When I ordered it the availability date for it and the ethernet card were listed as June 28th with an estimated delivery date of June 30th. This is good because I’ve got some free time from then until the middle of July so that arrival date was going to be good to let me work on things some. Today, though, I get this email. It now says that the ship date is changed to July 30th. My online invoice still shows the ship date as June 28th. The microchipdirect.com website says the availability date is July 2nd. So I’m thinking my chances of seeing this anytime soon are completely random and probably not likely.