Blank Plank prototyping board

General
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the current “stock” was a small prototype batch. Once everything is dialed in ian does a much larger run for the real stock

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I made 20 and gave away around 10. I will need to check with the office tomorrow to see if they’re all really gone. If so, wow you all, thanks for checking it out!

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The office says there should be 6, however the quality of the PCBs is garbage. We’re going to remake the boards and replace the ones in the kit, as well as mailing out replacements for the samples sent.

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i have the red pcb, looks ok to me.pretty close together.

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I have red board as well and looks ok for my use case.

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I’m glad some of the red boards had aligned drills.

NOTE: This is just to help me validate my understanding … not actually asking to change anything!

What about having VIN flow from both edges (vias from topside make this easy), and keeping the GND plane connected at the centerline? Also, with vias added at outer edge for both VIN and GND from the top side?

Did I understand correctly that this would effectively reduce the worst-case return path by half?

Non-selected designs...

I also thought about branching the VIN lines to the nearest edge. I made a nice “X” pattern. Many reasons not to pursue that option, including:

  • Layout of the board would be annoyingly manual vs. simple copy/paste at offsets, due to the need to rotate based on which edge was closest.
  • silkscreen (and user usage) is much more comprehensible on the column pattern
  • Would not reduce worst-case return path length very much

Thanks!

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stumbled over this interesting comment regarding soldermask. green one often gets better tolerances since the cheaper boardhouses seem to have the processes dialed in much better on that one

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Will a final design be available for everyone who wants to make their own version of this Blank Plank using Kicad V9.0X ?

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Wow, so nice we are off the eagle treadmill. Remember when kicad was barely usable? Underappreciated advances.

What component doesn’t work with kicad 9?

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Been using it since 2006 when I helped to translate the French documentation to English. Got together a small group of translators on Yahoo and got my name in the credits. Now I help students to use it in an embedded systems class.

PS, I don’t speak French. Just used machine translation software (Sustrans).

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To follow up your earlier question, the blank plank kicad files are here. It was done with kicad 8 though, not sure about nine (was this discussed above? I couldn’t find it).

I’m going to check to see if we ever shipped the replacements after Spring Festival.

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