exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

exxos wrote: 19 Mar 2020 16:51

rubber_jonnie wrote: 19 Mar 2020 16:41 I could do with some sort of exxos subscription scheme where I just pay a fixed amount each month and get the stuff sent as it comes in :)

That kinda thing was actually discussed several months ago when I was programming my new store... That people could build up credit on their account and do the order when they had enough credit. I think people were generally against it for various reasons, so I did not bother in the end.

Though some of this hardware is going to get incredibly expensive because of the amount of stuff which is packed on it. People do struggle to buy stuff because they cannot afford the outlay all in one go..

If I'm honest, I was half joking, but not everyone is lucky enough to be able to afford this stuff without a bit of saving, so maybe a thought to revisit?

At some point something has gone seriously tits-up :roll:

It is like the power rails are labelled backwards in some points, and other points it is labelled correctly, and other points it seems to have two different names on the same signal :roll:

Everything I rooted on the board thinking it was VCC, was actually GND... whereas I have just been renaming stuff on the PCB to GND1 and VCC1, And making the top layer GND instead of the bottom layer... only now the bulk of the poly-fill is on VCC not GND :roll: Its like VCC and GND are backwards, and every signal has 3 different names to it.

I'm sat puzzling over what has happened with this, but I think I may have to start this PCB again from scratch :( which is annoying as I have literally spent all day every day for the past week routing the thing so it is like 50 hours wasted work :cry:

I can only think because eagle crashes every now and then that the PCB file itself has got corrupted at some point. I do go up a "letter" every few hours so I can backtrack to a previous version if something does go wrong, but I think this problem could have been there right from the start. I guess the only saving grace may be I know what the basic layout of everything is now, so copying it on a new file at least will be quicker in some respects.



I'm not going to get this fixed today and as I am not at home on weekends and busy with day job work next week, I'm not going to get the order off any time soon for this so but we have to wait for a couple of months... So I suppose it was a good job I got the original Trudie boards on order, so at least I can finish the firmware off when they get built.

I've ripped off all the VCC and GND symbols and put them in manually like this.. and that seems OK... So its a matter of trying to rework the polyfill layers as top and bottom layers are actually swapped now...


EDIT:

This was supposed to be the VCC fill... But it is actually GND... it is still pretty good anyway but annoying as is not the fills its supposed to be :roll:

That sucks but not as much as it would if youd paid for the boards to be made.

A step backwards but I'm willing to bet you'll be much quicker and will better results this time.

PhilC wrote: 20 Mar 2020 14:59 That sucks but not as much as it would if youd paid for the boards to be made.

A step backwards but I'm willing to bet you'll be much quicker and will better results this time.

Yeah, I'm trying to recover the design first... You see I spent a lot of time rooting tracks to the left of the CPU GND pin, so the fill would be to the right of the pin and would flood fill everything really well.. but now there is several tracks in the way as GND is actually 2 more pins to the left now, so the polyfill gets broken.. And there is just no room physically to move those tracks anywhere.

Because the fill is pretty good on VCC anyway, I am trying to fiddle stuff to let the fill work again... I mean the PCB is all connected up as it should be, but the floodfill isn't where where it is supposed to be :(

@exxos Fingers crossed you can recover most of it without binning it off completely. At least there are no boards ordered.

This is basically what happens.. Where the GND is all linked up, but its got a huge chunk out of it for the VCC fill... probably nobody else would not care about it... But, well, OCD etc etc :)



EDIT:

So this is how I wanted it to be...



EDIT2:

Managed to link up the GND fill a lot better now... Still some tweaking to do at the top, then the nightmare of tweaking the new VCC fill...



EDIT3:

The VCC layer worked out well, as it was originally the GND layer...

So looks like I should be happy with this once I am done tweaking...

We back on track...Pun not intended...

Got a few more lines to wire up...Or hopefully will get this done later tonight if I don't spot anything I have missed of...


I did try auto routing this originally, and I think it used generally around 200-300 via's :roll:

More final PCB image...

And this is what it may look like in the real world. Nice board @exxos :thumbup: