Progress is good!  Four or five days behind where I was hoping to be, but on balance, good.

Got my polarshield circuit boards through at the end of last week, and extremely relieved (and frankly shocked) that there are no horrible errors on it.  I did forget to order some parts that I need to test the XBee side of things, but those’ll come shortly.

Soldered up the first one without any problems – first time I’ve done anything significant with surface mount stuff.  Slow, but not the big challenge I feared it might be.  A few things that I’d do differently next time round came up but I’ll do a proper hardware review another day.

The real message is: It works!

Now, lets get this software into shape…