PCB layout - JHarvey

[jharvey]

Yeah it's to tight for multiple via's. The more I think about it, the more I think I'll just delete the traces and move it all down, making that run way... That's a fair bit of work though, and I'm not looking forward to it.

[Delta]

I haven't had a good look yet (too many things to do) but have you allowed plenty of width for high powered traces?? Remember that injectors could be drawing 3-4Amps (if bank fired) fans/fuel pumps will draw large current etc. The board I've layed out for my gearbox controller ended up with a fairly sizeable 'runway' down the middle for two reasons - the width of the traces and also I left room between my mosfets for heatsinking as I'll be using L shaped bar to join to the top of the case and my mosfet are in the middle of the board. Having the space between the MOSFETs in my case helped a lot with routing the high power traces to the connector on the side of the board - I'll post up a pic if you like?

[Fred]

Jared,

Just don't be mad at me when I tell you all your pins have to move etc. I did warn you that you were jumping the gun in even making the schematic a while back, and more recently about doing the layout in particular as it is heavily reliant on me. I can't deliver what you need for a while at this point due to work and the hdd crash, so perhaps write some html pages documenting the hardware design and/or process for a while instead?

Fred.

[jharvey]

I think I've left wide enough traces but don't quote me. I'm using three built in fuses, one at 10 amps, and two at 1 amp. I sized traces such that these fuses should burn up if that current is put to them. I then made the connecting traces bigger than that. For the 1 amp, I used a 17 mill wide traces, and for the 10 amp, I used 40 mills with 37 mill fuse trace. Also I assumed 2 oz copper.

I haven't connected the pins to traces yet, so I can't get mad. Right now the traces mostly all go near the bottom of the TA card, from there I need to finish running them to the pins. I'm quite certain I can get them to any pin, I just need to know which ones we should go for. Also I should be able to add some blank via's that will allow for easy tear up and reattachment via wire. If that option is required.

[AbeFM]

Yeah - vias the size of wire is good. I've seen vias too small to get anything into.

I don't think you need multiple vias (sometimes you see that for current, but more often you just see larger diameters) for reliability.

I have seen one pitfall (just recently), if you have a via, solder mask both sides, or neither, since if you do just one, flux can get in, and break the via from the inside since it's hard to clean.

[jharvey]

So I'm looking for different colors for the PCB. I found these colors of FR4

http://www.currentcomposites.com/html/e ... nates.html

Then of course you can have one of several different colors for the solder mask. At least one provider has these colors red, blue, green, matte green,
black, clear, white and matte black.

Color combos I think are nice might include clear (natural) fr4 w/ blue mask, blue fr4 w/ clear mask, orange fr4 w/ clear mask, orange fr4 w/ white mask, orange fr4 w/ black mask.

I think I like the natural w/ blue mask the most because you could backlight the panel and make it glow. On the orange with white or black mask, you can leave areas unmasked creating images. Perhaps the DIYEFI pig can be added. Any how just some more to think about.

I wonder if red and blue could be combined to make purple... Hmmmm.

[Fred]

It's not a pig, it's a GNU head doing a burnout ;-)

[jharvey]

Ya learn something every day... I see it now.

[AbeFM]

AH!!! I thought it was a bull.

[Fred]

<<<<<

Spot the true open source enthusiast ;-)

You guys are sooooo noob :-)