exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Does anyone know if it is possible to move items on the PCB without it breaking tracks the pads are connected to ?

exxos wrote: 27 Apr 2023 16:58 Does anyone know if it is possible to move items on the PCB without it breaking tracks the pads are connected to ?

In Kicad 5, only in some extremely limited cases by using the 'G' key, IIRC. But in reality, no.

BW

Badwolf wrote: 27 Apr 2023 19:46 In Kicad 5, only in some extremely limited cases by using the 'G' key, IIRC. But in reality, no.

"G" doesn't do anything it seems. Do you know if its possible in later versions ?

PLD getting some love.


Also made the board about 1cm smaller along the bottom edge.

@Badwolf I have had a little bit of thought relating to the firmware..

I connected those 2 FPU signals direct to the CPU. This test was done with bodge wires originally and I think the firmware was tweaked for that change ?

However we basically have two different sets of firmware here now I assume :roll: So is there any thoughts as to making the wire bodge a actual modification to the original board and sticking with one branch of firmware, or just simply starting a new branch for the board re-spin ?

Also not sure if to simply call this board a revision 6 or call it a "DFB1A" to differentiate this between the previous board runs better ? :shrug:

exxos wrote: 28 Apr 2023 11:42 Also not sure if to simply call this board a revision 6 or call it a "DFB1A" to differentiate this between the previous board runs better ? :shrug:

I've been having a little think about this and whilst I think firmware compatiblity is the ideal, it's probably not realistic. Also breaking the firmware compatiblity would let you correct my clock routeing errors -- the CPLD will work more effectively and the timings be tighter if the oscillators fed into the global clock pins rather than how I have them configured now (I mistakenly used global clock pins as clock outputs as I misunderstood how they worked).

Let's call it DFB1X -- eXxos edition. :)

BW

Badwolf wrote: 28 Apr 2023 15:02 I've been having a little think about this and whilst I think firmware compatiblity is the ideal, it's probably not realistic. Also breaking the firmware compatiblity would let you correct my clock routeing errors -- the CPLD will work more effectively and the timings be tighter if the oscillators fed into the global clock pins rather than how I have them configured now (I mistakenly used global clock pins as clock outputs as I misunderstood how they worked).

Full carnage it is then :lol: :thumbup:

It may actually help with routing of the odd signal here and there if pins could be swapped. But am not going to start randomly changing that stuff currently anyway.

I see if I can figure out the global clock pins are. Then see how problematical it is to route it to new oscillator.

Let's call it DFB1X -- eXxos edition. :)

Works for me :D

EDIT:

Possibly the only "logical" swap would be the OSC and RAMCLOCK :shrug: All the global clock seem to be on the left side of the chip :roll:

exxos wrote: 28 Apr 2023 15:07 Possibly the only "logical" swap would be the OSC and RAMCLOCK :shrug: All the global clock seem to be on the left side of the chip :roll:

Yeah, guess how long I spent re-orienting it like that only to later found it it was wasted :lol:

OSC, XCPUCLK and (maybe?) 500kHz are the only real clock inputs. They should use the pins if they can.

BW

Badwolf wrote: 27 Apr 2023 19:46In Kicad 5, only in some extremely limited cases by using the 'G' key, IIRC. But in reality, no.

It is not better in Kicad 7. The [D]rag feature is very limited and require to redo things many times to have a more attractive PCB design.

TotO wrote: 28 Apr 2023 20:28

Badwolf wrote: 27 Apr 2023 19:46In Kicad 5, only in some extremely limited cases by using the 'G' key, IIRC. But in reality, no.

It is not better in Kicad 7. The [D]rag feature is very limited and require to redo things many times to have a more attractive PCB design.

I am finding that problem as well :( in eagle, well version 7 I mostly use, it has the same problem moving things has to be done manually. I tried Eagle 9, that does allow moving group items which does make things a lot easier, it also has a straight intractable which is very useful. But other than that I still tend to use eagle7 because it is just inherently more stable ( but still not terribly great either).

Kicad have been using a lot past few days and while I can only do basic stuff, it's "shove" tool is like Eagle 9 has, so I really like that. Just don't really understand why they cannot add this feature into KiCad. Even if it does not recalculate the angles of the tracks and such it would still be a huge time saver if you simply did not "break" them.

I think moving things one at a time is good because it does recalculate tracks and moves them which is great. Just seems really weird that multiple ones cannot be done. This is basically where all my time is going currently :roll: