Today, I received another update on the manufacturing process. The earlier update today was named "UV Curing" and arrived at 10am this one is named "Surface finishing" and arrived at 1pm (eastern). The update was sent by email as well as made available on their site, as it was previously. For information on previous steps, please see these blog posts:

• Part 1: Initial Circuit Design and Prototyping (also includes parts list and info about the rack case)
• Part 2: PCB Layout and Manufacturing
• Part 3: Manufacturing WIP Update - Board UV Curing

Here are the two photos of the surface plating/finishing of the pads on the board. Again, I have resized these source images to 50% of the size pcb-pool made available to me.

If you compare these with the previous images, you can see that the through holes are now a different color; they've been plated to make them easier to solder. It's starting to look like a real board now!