Finally, I managed to finish the routing of the board. After changing the width of the board and having to move the digital ports to fit the new board dimensions, I had to redo most of the connections. Routing the board for the second time was much faster as I knew where and how to lay the tracks. This proves that planning is a very important step in PCB design. As a beginner in PCB design, sometimes it is hard to foresee a problem before bumping into it. In this project a lot of times I had to redo the connections or move some of the components after I had already connected them and etc. As they say: “Practice makes perfect”
Unconnected pins
After connecting everything Kicad was still recognizing more than 150 unconnected pins. I was really shocked cause I was done with all the connections, but after a little bit of research online I found out that I also need to connect all the ground and power pins on their respective layers. Kicad does not consider the vias to the ground/power plane as a ground/power connection so you still need to reconnect all of them again on the ground/power layer. This does not mean that you will have tracks on the ground/power layer since the tracks and the pour on that layer have the same net value, it is just a way to tell the software that they are connected. In a nutshell, the ground and power planes should also be routed.
Another important thing I learned this week was to record all the data when performing an experiment. If you are carrying out an experiment keeping a record of the data is very important so that if later you could not get the same data performing the same experiment, you can just dig up the old data and see what is wrong.
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