I took a few more pictures of the failed boards and sent them to the fantastic people at circuits.io.  They have very generously offered to send me new ones at no charge 🙂  Hopefully these new boards will work out.
I also had a quick go at getting one of the boards working. Â After soldering lots of wires on the bottom of the board I powered it up and let the magic smoke out of my voltage regulator, so it looks like I may have a crook connection somewhere. Â It could also be because I didn’t have the right regulator available so tried another with a slightly different pinout. Â I put some heat shrink over the input lead and bent it into the right position. Maybe I didn’t get it quite right. Â The interesting thing is that the Mac I had it plugged in to didn’t complain about the device drawing too much current, so I don’t quite know what went wrong. Â Time to head out to Jaycar and get the part I actually need I guess 😉
I hope you can track the track down 😉
Dad.