Piece of Mind

A few weeks and a few swearing sessions later…

Congratulations!!
The layout is complete and has no shorted nets.

2 layers PCB. Probably going to get it manufactured by Olimex.

This is my first board ever, so I’m guessing there are tons of errors everywhere. lol.

All the surface mount caps are the same type (0.1uF ceramic). I used through hole capacitors for the other few because SMD capacitors tend not to be labeled… the labels would be too small to see anyways.

2 connectors on the left are BNC (oscilloscope probe connection). Goes to analog frontend (the part without ground plane), then the programmable gain amplifier (U1), then 2 ADCs (U3 U4), then FPGA (U6). U10 is the 25MHz oscillator for the FPGA. U5 is the DAC used to set voltage offset. U7, U8, U12 are voltage regulators. U11 is charge pump doubling inverter to generate negative voltage for amplifiers. U9 is USB interface chip. The connector on the right is USB-B.

In case you are wondering, most of the holes (181 holes!) are vias (connections between the 2 layers), not for soldering components. So no, I won’t be spending the next 20 years of my life soldering this board =P.

Next step, throwing a pile of money at Digikey!! (very exciting)

Actually, I think I will solicit some feedback from random forums first.

The layout file in gEDA PCB format -
http://cyberfish.wecheer.com/tmp/board.pcb

Feel free to poke around.

On Debian/Ubuntu, do “apt-get install geda”, and “pcb board.pcb”.

I don’t think gEDA runs on Windows. Sorry. Some people reportedly have successfully built it on Windows, though.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 28th, 2010 at 11:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.