exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

exxos wrote: 05 Jan 2020 00:58 Icky is working on v6 which is all 3v stuff. So he has gotta mash on loads of IO converters in, and I also found a single 3v SRAM chip which is also being mashed onto the board. I gave icky a near impossible challenge to route it all in such a small space. I think it would end up being 6 layers, but icky is trying to keep it to 4. Its a very difficult board to route though. In particular as I keep adding stuff to the design :)

Will this break icky ? Tune in for next weeks exciting episode :lol:

It didn't break me but the cold has. Flashy Clock V6 is now being manufactured by the PCB folk and its still on 4 layers :)
Having a 3.3V expansion bus on the next version of the H4 would really make this so much easier.

@Icky , very nice board. :thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup: What are you using to generate the virtual images? They look great.

PaulJ wrote: 08 Jan 2020 16:52 @Icky , very nice board. :thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup: What are you using to generate the virtual images? They look great.

Thanks @PaulJ.

Eagle has a feature to generate a Fusion 360 model of the PCB. However it's not as simple as click and render as most devices in Eagle come with the footprint and symbol but no 3D object.

Rendering the H4 was a mammoth task updating the libraries to have 3D objects. Some objects needed to be created from scratch or modified from other objects.

For example there are no DB19 3D objects but there are DB25 objects so a bit of CAD manipulation and I was able to create a DB19. The ST Monitor and Floppy sockets were drawn from scratch from the dimensions on their datasheets.

Once the board and its components are in Fusion then a render can be created of the modelled object :)

Icky wrote: 08 Jan 2020 16:42 Having a 3.3V expansion bus on the next version of the H4 would really make this so much easier.

At the risk of having an idea... couldn't you create a plug-in board doing the level shifting for the H4 & then all the rest of the boards can be pure 3v...and those boards could work in the new 3v expansion sockets of the future design.

My 2p...

JezC wrote: 08 Jan 2020 20:31 At the risk of having an idea... couldn't you create a plug-in board doing the level shifting for the H4 & then all the rest of the boards can be pure 3v...and those boards could work in the new 3v expansion sockets of the future design.

We are actually planning on doing that :)

Great, will be eagerly awaiting that to add into at least one of my H4 boards
. :yay: :cheer: :thanksyellow: :thumbup:

The new FCV6 boards arrived in the post today.

Looks pretty good, almost professional (no pun intended). So many vias on that. Be interesting to see how difficult it is to build.

@PhilC - I tried to clean up the silk layer a bit as it was messy. It's as I said to @exxos I wasn't happy with some of the routing but would have been moving tracks around for the sake of it.

I'm not going to build one up as I don't have the time and if you had seen the hash job I did over the weekend with my shaky hands on a different project you would agree I shouldn't. We are going to get these assembled by someone who can do a decent job :)

Dont give them to me then, with my hands most of those caps would be on the floor :lol: