Experiential

I started the week by generating the BOM and also all the Gerber files needed for manufacturing of the board. Something I learned was if there are any fill areas in the design, it has to be filled before generating the Gerber files. The Gerber files are generated based on Read more

Routing the board was finished last week. However, the ethernet connection looked really messy and not optimized, Ethernet connections were where I started this PCB design with. Therefore, I rotated the chip and reconnected it again, this time with a lot more care. The connection is now much better. BOM Read more

This week I was mostly double checking all the connections and also all the footprints. There were a few footprints that needed to be modified and rerouted. The I/O ports connected to the FPGA were also rerouted, this time using the differential tracks instead of single ones. That opens up Read more

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 Read more

This week I was given a new task, in order to carry out this task I had to learn a few new things. First I learned how to set up a Raspberry pi, which requires installing an operating system (Raspbian) on an SD-card. This procedure is explained in details on Read more

This week when I tried to open the project, I faced a number of errors. This was caused because we have upgraded the systems at our office and the new version of Kicad could not recognize most of the libraries and models in the project. In order to fix this, Read more

This week I spend most of my time assigning the footprints to each component and repositioning all the components on the board so that all the newly added digital ports can fit in nicely and be accessible. There are a total of 78 digital pins and 12 analogue pins available on Read more