Hi all,
Apologies for the number of questions, I’m part the way through my hzerller based (RPIZ2W, AdaFruit triple bonnet) project and since I’m including power management (balances lipo+psu), accelerometer\fuel gauge, and the lack of availability of some boards (specifically the AdaFruit triple bonnet) it just makes more sense to out-source the design of the PCB hub for what I’m doing.
Anyway I’ve tried to design the circuit, but tripping over the passives, I’ve come to the conclusion I can’t do this myself, but if successful the end result would be a board that I can drop the Pi into, connect the battery, psu, and panels and it’ll be more assembling rather than soldering olympics.
It’s not a trivial specification I do understand, but am curious if any has done something complex like this, whether fiverr is the nightmare it’s starting to feel like 
Thanks guys, this forum has been such help, hopefully I can give back.
Ross
I eventually bit the bullet and got stuck into KiCad design and came out of the other end happy, having designed the three boards I needed (a power path\distribution\charge board carrying up to 6A or 10A peak, a separate USB audio board and a replacement active driver board with I2C accelerometer and lipo monitoring). I’m waiting for these boards now but am thinking of refining this a bit more now I’ve discovered the CM4 modules.
I haven’t seen any CM4 based driver boards but they would be really easy to design, although I’m getting very good results with my PiZ2W I haven’t really the need but if anyone was interested in a CM4 (or 5) based driver board I’d be able to design one. The KiCad stuff is super simple when coupled with the JLC Tools which take away the pain of symbol, footprint and 3d model sourcing, not to mention the component sourcing and stock checking, it also handles all of the fabrication output (Gerbers, BOM, CPL, etc).
With PCBA the cost of the driver boards is around $80 for 5, but that number goes down to $500 on a run of a 100. Hopefully I’ll have my Kickstarter project up and running soon once I figure out the optimal way of filiming the panels. 
You know you can create your own panels with Kicad plugin KiKit Panelize PCB ? Which does most the work for you. Takes some looking into but not too hard.
depending on the size of the PCB, you can easily get 9 on a single panel.
so when you select 5 you are getting 45 of them.
Thanks kingdo9, I didn’t think about self-paneling, when I quoted for larger numbers JLC automatically suggested paneling which would save costs but doing it on smaller runs makes sense! I’m not at the stage where I have the time to stencil the paste and bake the boards myself yet, still using PCBA for that. 
