I agree, not having access to specialized tools and/or expertise makes things a lot harder. I was more commenting on the "access" part though, as in not everyone trying to produce such a board will have access to advanced tools or people with experience building these things.But when it comes to more advanced or higher-speed boards, where placement, tracking, and other things are critical, there's a lot more which can go wrong and be difficult to diagnose and debug without specialist tools, skills and experience.
We don't have counts of how many DIY RP2 builds work first time or don't, so there's no ratio or percentage chance of success one can give, but I count some 115 posts in this sub-forum alone where such a build did not work and help was needed.
If you always had all the skills and experience you needed for a project, you wouldn't learn much, would you. In any case, OPs project doesn't seem that complicated to me.My view is it is walking a potentially frustrating and expensive path if it can be predicted you will need tools, skills and experience you don't have if things don't work first time. Given the potential for it all being wasted effort and sunk cost I usually steer clear of such projects and would advise others to do the same if they don't have the tools, skills and experience which may be needed. I would therefore presume they do have those if embarking on such a build.
Statistics: Posted by Tharre — Sun Jul 20, 2025 10:54 pm