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One of my startups was purchased by QLogic, which made PCI cards in bulk. One of their corporate standards is that prototypes have red PCBs, to prevent them eve
by greglindahl 8y ago
One of my startups was purchased by QLogic, which made PCI cards in bulk. One of their corporate standards is that prototypes have red PCBs, to prevent them ever being mixed together with production parts. These days I have some friends who have a particular debit card that's the same color of red. Every time I see it, I twitch.
- dkersten 8y agoI wonder if this is also why a lot of boards from eg sparkfun are red.
- pmorici 8y agoSparkfun does the red for branding. Their early stuff was green. They also use black for their SparkX experimental boards. Adafruit is know for their blue boards and oshpark for plurple it’s all branding.
- mhh__ 8y agoI would guess not, given that these days (At least in small quantities, which I assume scales) the choice of colour is aesthetic (To first order) rather than dictated economically.
- borgel 8y agoAt work we often try to do a different color for each revision so you can tell at a glance what's in a given unit. It's definitely saved me a few times!
- starky 8y agoWe use different solder mask colours to differentiate different product variants that share a board outline. It is way easier to tell a factory to install the red board when making a specific product variant than to have them read a part number off the board.
- pvarangot 8y agoWe started doing that but I think we ran out of colors pretty fast.
- dotancohen 8y agoI used to buy some quadcopters and parts from China, and there is a particular board revision that was horrible. It was easily identifiable because it was red. I wonder if this was a prototype or early production run that just kept going. I was buying this particular model for about two years, and the reds would show up during this entire time.
- milankragujevic 8y agoEachine? Or Syma? Both have a version in red that's bad.
- dotancohen 8y agoCheerson CX-10. Great quad for teaching, but very unreliable. Also, most parts can easily be scavenged from other ruined quads but the aftermarket propellers are horrible.