Engineering Elegance

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 I managed to bill of materials which is a document that lists all the components used and their values and some additional information for purchasing and assembling the components. There 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 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 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, I added all the libraries again from the Library Wizard. In the new version, it is no longer possible to add all the libraries at the same time, they have 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 this board. I also encountered an error (“IO_Error: maximum line length exceeded”) this is because the maximum line length should be less than 99 characters and sometimes when an external Read more