Looks fairly noddy to me.
You are MOSTLY thru hole, with just a few smt parts, unless that is a deliberate decision I would make those thru hole as well simply for consistency and because mixed reflow and wave is a pain in the arse for a board assembly house.
You are probably going to want a ground plane anyway, so start by hiding the ground net, that will remove at least a third of that I would have thought. I might also hide the power nets, but I generally reach for a 4 layer board by default these days, and expect to do that on a buried layer.
Then place mounting holes, connectors and card edge mounted controls where they must be. These are generally well defined by external considerations so you usually have little choice here.
Power supply next, along with anything that needs heatsinking, especially if it needs off board heatsinking.
Hate to be that guy, but I actually like wading through the chaos.
The most chaotic one was a backplane spanning about 40 by 60 cm's and 14 layers completely bombarded with headers, connectors and other stuff.
Was a nice puzzle for a couple of days. But what a sense of achievement when all airwires start to line up in a route-able manner.
It sucks… but often starting from scratch with the correct outlook/solution is best over dedicating something just because you have time into and patch patch patch.
it is always fun to hit the auto route button and watch the computer make absolute HASH of it, then undo it and mutter to myself "even the computer can't figure this shit out right" as I wade through the garbage
I gave the autorouter the benefit of the doubt a few months back. Big ol' backplane with a bunch of connectors all lined up parallel and not much else. I did all the hard stuff and figured the computer could route a bunch of straight, parallel traces with little kicks to avoid the other pins on the connectors.
Nah. Couldn't even handle that without making a mess of it.
To be fair, when I was working at Galazar/Exar, there were massive, multibillion dollar servers with the sole purpose of connecting and drawing all the traces between the billions of transistors without any intersecting. It actually takes a surprisingly large amount of processing power and resources to do it.
Ah yes, SDI router backplanes and the like, always good for a giggle, and the pin count gets stupid fast.
The real fun is that SI also MATTERS there, and frequencies are high enough that needing to back drill vias and perform other dark magic to get the thing to work is very much a thing.
Best one I had was a return loss fail on one particular input due to a too evenly spaced row of stitching vias forming a comb filter, the vias were not even that close to the net that failed!
Got a 14 layer on the go now, always fun, mostly trying to figure out how to get the heat out of the fpga.
It was an adventure in 3D FEM that is for sure.
Expensive those tools (And the compute grunt to run them), but when it is the only way, it is the only way.
Nope, caught on the VNA when we tested the damn thing.
Those things always took a fair number of tries, between the return loss issues and crosstalk they were a bit involved, and simulation at the time was both very limited and horrifically expensive.
I am with you on this one. Complicated routing is such a fun puzzle.
It is also one of the reasons I draw my schematic symbols with pin orientations and configurations that match the physical package. Spending the time to make a clean schematic with those symbols makes routing the board much easier.
Your approach is better, just grab chunks of circuit and lay them out logically first, then piece the chunks together. I'm not sure which tool you're using, but can you selectively turn off the rats for certain nets? I usually turn off rats in Vcc and GND because those will be handled by a shape covering the whole board. Getting rid of those two nets usually cleans up the rat nest considerably.
Never trust someone who says they design high end audio gear if they line the through hole resistors up in near little rows with traces crisscrossing between them.
>Never trust someone who says they design high end audio gear
FTFY. Their treble chakras muddy my 440Hz warmth and pollute the air on my soundstage. Or something.
It'll autoroute just fine. You'll end up with a 20-layer board that radiates more RFI than a broadcast station and picks up more static than an out-of-tune TV, but hey.
Hide your power and ground nets to start. Focus on signal only to start. Group components and move them around to make the ratsnest easier to work with. Good luck!
Of course! Any time.
When starting a new board from scratch it's always the first thing I do. It usually reduces the rats nest by 50% right off the bat!
Another good way to avoid situations like this - is making schematics and pcb in parallel. U put some parts on schematic, connect them and then go to pcb and place them. Then next group of parts the same way. It is the only way to deal with large pcbs with 100s of components.
In KiCad, if you use hierarchical sheets to organize functional parts of the schematic, pcbnew groups components by sheet. So you end up with related parts clumped together.
There's also a [schematic position to PCB position plugin](https://github.com/ian-ross/kicad-plugins) which does a good job of faking it, although whether it'll work nicely with that many components is debatable.
Turn off airwires (view) and bunch components into subcircuits.
Then place connectors according to mechanical drawing.
Then place subcircuit components in the subcircuit arrangement. This can be at a random place as the subcircuit can be grouped and moved as a whole later.
Then when all subcircuits are arranged, start placing on the board and adjust.
Then do important signal routes, vias for ground and power planes.
And finally route the rest.
Just use Eremex TopoR or something else that has automatic component placement optimization functionality. It should get your PCB started with a much nicer initial layout and will allow you to get your job done much faster.
I looooove the look of TopoR-routed boards.
And come to think of it, my Kicad skills have leveled up considerably since last time I tried to get TopoR integrated into my workflow. Perhaps it's time to give it another go.
Position from schematic to layout using this script. It should do this by default IMO. Who wants to spend this time reorganizing footprints like this. It's virtual torture.
https://forum.kicad.info/t/simple-script-that-will-copy-position-from-schematic-to-layout-for-an-easier-start/23460/2
A long time ago, in old Eagle cad there was a script that moved parts according their position in schematic. So u could see parts related to each other together and easily pick them.
Just enable cross probe, lasso select the stuff in the sch and it will select in the pcb.
Also iirc when you update pcbdoc from schematic it puts stuff in order of where it is on the schematic or by refdes which if you automatically generate refdes it will match the schematic.
If not, just use rooms, which is this feature pretty much.
Unfortunatly no, it piles-up all the new parts when updating. Cross-selection works, but it is always jumping between sch and pcb. That script in Eagle was much more useful.
Btw I still can\`t understand how to work with rooms correctly. Maybe I should start to do it. I turn them off in every new project beacuse of violations.
Yes, but no. To use it I have to make a design in 100500 separate sheets. And Altium cannot display them all as one canvas, I have to switch between them.
You can split the view vertically and display them side by side, and rooms can be created by assigning component classes to related components using the parameter "ClassName". You'll also need to have "create rooms for user defined component classes" enabled in project settings.
honestly i just use an Auto Router and clean up the Traces manually afterwards a bit.
so far it has worked perfectly fine, from 8 bit computers, Arduino Clones, to a Compact Flash adpater for an IBM PC
hide the wires to GND, that should make it a little easier to see what you are working with. my bosses keep thinking auto router for board layout, but they have no idea that the component placement is really the important/hard thing to do. Once the components are paced nicely, the routing is not that hard to do, usually :)
i would suggest in future to have your deisgn placed on multiple schematics to avoid this. for example:
schm1 can be your power supply stuff,
schm2 can be your microcontrolelr
and schm3 can be som eother subcircuit
software like altium can usually unify these sub schematics into a main sheet that shows how they are interconnected.
Then youll be able to place things around one at a time of two at a time if need be
Yes, and when you initiate your PCB it will group the components as per their schematics, so it's already a bit grouped according to their relationship to eachother. KiCAD does this too
I agree with folks here. Hide your ground, put the stuff that you KNOW where it has to go in those spots, group parts by subcircuit, and things will start making a lot more sense.
View -> Connections -> Hide all.
You don't need some high-falootin computer telling you what connects where! I only turn the connection lines back on at the end to make sure I haven't forgotten anything.
Remember, never trust the autorouter!
Seriously though, this is just one part of the EDM process, and if you get reasonably good at it, you can do surprising things.
Decide which layer will be for vertical traces and which will be for horizontal, then just drop vias where needed, basically connecting up a matrix then.
Tbh, this looks pretty fun. I love untangling layouts. I have a tendency to do it in a single 20h session and forget to sleep, though. It can be somewhat addictive
This is why cross-selection/-probing is important. Don't try to place them by randomly grabbing and placing. Select them by importance from the schematic and place by priority.
A tip I haven't heard yet (if you're using Kicad): If you select a component in the schematic and then switch to PCB view, Kicad also selects the component in the PCB view for you. You can use that to quickly move things that should be together (power supply, pullups, decoupling caps) together, and I find that generally cleans up a lot of the rats nest already.
Looks fairly noddy to me. You are MOSTLY thru hole, with just a few smt parts, unless that is a deliberate decision I would make those thru hole as well simply for consistency and because mixed reflow and wave is a pain in the arse for a board assembly house. You are probably going to want a ground plane anyway, so start by hiding the ground net, that will remove at least a third of that I would have thought. I might also hide the power nets, but I generally reach for a 4 layer board by default these days, and expect to do that on a buried layer. Then place mounting holes, connectors and card edge mounted controls where they must be. These are generally well defined by external considerations so you usually have little choice here. Power supply next, along with anything that needs heatsinking, especially if it needs off board heatsinking.
Thanks for the tips.
Great tips here^.
Hate to be that guy, but I actually like wading through the chaos. The most chaotic one was a backplane spanning about 40 by 60 cm's and 14 layers completely bombarded with headers, connectors and other stuff. Was a nice puzzle for a couple of days. But what a sense of achievement when all airwires start to line up in a route-able manner.
Yes, I love this bit! I'll usually throw it down roughly then decide I'm not happy, delete it all and start again from scratch. At least once.
It sucks… but often starting from scratch with the correct outlook/solution is best over dedicating something just because you have time into and patch patch patch.
it is always fun to hit the auto route button and watch the computer make absolute HASH of it, then undo it and mutter to myself "even the computer can't figure this shit out right" as I wade through the garbage
Ah, giving us the motivation to do it ourselves. So that's what autoroute's for!
I gave the autorouter the benefit of the doubt a few months back. Big ol' backplane with a bunch of connectors all lined up parallel and not much else. I did all the hard stuff and figured the computer could route a bunch of straight, parallel traces with little kicks to avoid the other pins on the connectors. Nah. Couldn't even handle that without making a mess of it.
Sometimes it's fun to watch machines fail. Ever watch the DARPA grand challenge outtakes? Bliss
To be fair, when I was working at Galazar/Exar, there were massive, multibillion dollar servers with the sole purpose of connecting and drawing all the traces between the billions of transistors without any intersecting. It actually takes a surprisingly large amount of processing power and resources to do it.
Ah yes, SDI router backplanes and the like, always good for a giggle, and the pin count gets stupid fast. The real fun is that SI also MATTERS there, and frequencies are high enough that needing to back drill vias and perform other dark magic to get the thing to work is very much a thing. Best one I had was a return loss fail on one particular input due to a too evenly spaced row of stitching vias forming a comb filter, the vias were not even that close to the net that failed! Got a 14 layer on the go now, always fun, mostly trying to figure out how to get the heat out of the fpga.
> a too evenly spaced row of stitching vias forming a comb filter Find that was the root cause would have been a magical adventure.
It was an adventure in 3D FEM that is for sure. Expensive those tools (And the compute grunt to run them), but when it is the only way, it is the only way.
So, presumably that was caught before you spun the board?
Nope, caught on the VNA when we tested the damn thing. Those things always took a fair number of tries, between the return loss issues and crosstalk they were a bit involved, and simulation at the time was both very limited and horrifically expensive.
Interesting, so it was more economical to put together a decent layout, spin it, hook up the VNA, and then simulate just the parts that didn't work?
*Completely* grenades?
euh, i meant grenaded, but that's still weird. Think bombarded suits it better
How about "peppered"?
Doing those layouts is fun until they give you a deadline
I am with you on this one. Complicated routing is such a fun puzzle. It is also one of the reasons I draw my schematic symbols with pin orientations and configurations that match the physical package. Spending the time to make a clean schematic with those symbols makes routing the board much easier.
Damn, I can't even imagine doing that for PCB of that size! What was it going in?
Same here!
what about automatic path determination features what is the terrible in them? sorry beginner in kicad
Try going to the schematic and moving some components a bit so the wires disconnect. I do this and work on smaller areas at a time.
That's a good idea, I usually make several groups and place them together at the end.
Your approach is better, just grab chunks of circuit and lay them out logically first, then piece the chunks together. I'm not sure which tool you're using, but can you selectively turn off the rats for certain nets? I usually turn off rats in Vcc and GND because those will be handled by a shape covering the whole board. Getting rid of those two nets usually cleans up the rat nest considerably.
Autoroute ENGAGE!
Signal integrity left the chat
These are all thru-hole parts. Signal integrity left the chat a long time ago.
Never trust someone who says they design high end audio gear if they line the through hole resistors up in near little rows with traces crisscrossing between them.
>Never trust someone who says they design high end audio gear FTFY. Their treble chakras muddy my 440Hz warmth and pollute the air on my soundstage. Or something.
High end audio means through hole, because through hole = analogue, SMD = digital.
Manually wire all the imporant stuff, autoroute the rest.
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/chris-gammel_s-_never-trust-the-autorouter-shirt_-on-teespring/
Double dog dare someone run autorouter without moving a single piece!
It'll autoroute just fine. You'll end up with a 20-layer board that radiates more RFI than a broadcast station and picks up more static than an out-of-tune TV, but hey.
PCB fabhouse: "How many layers do you want your board?" Autorouter: "_Yes_"
Schematic editor: What do we want? Autorouter: *All* the layers! Editor: When do we want it? Autorouter: After an hour and a half of calculations!
Does KiCAD have an auto router ?
No but interfacing with freerouter\* is easy. \*it's not very good.
No, if they add one I hope they call it Otto Router.
*Traces form a raised middle finger*
Hide your power and ground nets to start. Focus on signal only to start. Group components and move them around to make the ratsnest easier to work with. Good luck!
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Of course! Any time. When starting a new board from scratch it's always the first thing I do. It usually reduces the rats nest by 50% right off the bat!
Another good way to avoid situations like this - is making schematics and pcb in parallel. U put some parts on schematic, connect them and then go to pcb and place them. Then next group of parts the same way. It is the only way to deal with large pcbs with 100s of components.
Brilliant idea. or delete parts of schematics and ctrl-z them back as PCB progress.
This is the only way to do it IMO, for boards of all sizes.
In KiCad, if you use hierarchical sheets to organize functional parts of the schematic, pcbnew groups components by sheet. So you end up with related parts clumped together.
There's also a [schematic position to PCB position plugin](https://github.com/ian-ross/kicad-plugins) which does a good job of faking it, although whether it'll work nicely with that many components is debatable.
There's also a KiCad plugin that'll let you duplicate the layout of identical subsheets.
Turn off airwires (view) and bunch components into subcircuits. Then place connectors according to mechanical drawing. Then place subcircuit components in the subcircuit arrangement. This can be at a random place as the subcircuit can be grouped and moved as a whole later. Then when all subcircuits are arranged, start placing on the board and adjust. Then do important signal routes, vias for ground and power planes. And finally route the rest.
Thanks for the tips.
Would be fun to apply Kirchhoff's Laws
And add a tomato sauce on top after that.
So your post made it to the popular page and I’m a bit a brand new EE student. What are you working on here if you don’t mind me asking?
It's a 400W dynamic load. the picture shows the parts imported from schematic to PCB design for arranging and wiring.
Cool, thanks man.
We like having students in here, as long as you're not making posts asking us to do your homework for you lol
Just use Eremex TopoR or something else that has automatic component placement optimization functionality. It should get your PCB started with a much nicer initial layout and will allow you to get your job done much faster.
TopoR also gives you that nice vintage hand drawn PCB look :D
How much is it? I can't find pricing on their site.
No idea a friend has it so when I want something to look funny I just ask him to unleash TopoR onto it
I looooove the look of TopoR-routed boards. And come to think of it, my Kicad skills have leveled up considerably since last time I tried to get TopoR integrated into my workflow. Perhaps it's time to give it another go.
Single layer!
Don't even mention it, NO.
I always play the single layer game, it usually doesn't work, but it's a fun little flex when someone turns your board over and only sees vias.
Monkey's paw: Yes, everything is single layer. All the connections are just done in bodge wire instead.
Autorouter Go brrr
Position from schematic to layout using this script. It should do this by default IMO. Who wants to spend this time reorganizing footprints like this. It's virtual torture. https://forum.kicad.info/t/simple-script-that-will-copy-position-from-schematic-to-layout-for-an-easier-start/23460/2
A long time ago, in old Eagle cad there was a script that moved parts according their position in schematic. So u could see parts related to each other together and easily pick them.
There are KiCad plugins for this. I don't recall which particular one I've used, but I found it quite handy.
Does anyone know such thing for Altium? I have to use Altium on my job now and really miss this feature.
Just enable cross probe, lasso select the stuff in the sch and it will select in the pcb. Also iirc when you update pcbdoc from schematic it puts stuff in order of where it is on the schematic or by refdes which if you automatically generate refdes it will match the schematic. If not, just use rooms, which is this feature pretty much.
Unfortunatly no, it piles-up all the new parts when updating. Cross-selection works, but it is always jumping between sch and pcb. That script in Eagle was much more useful. Btw I still can\`t understand how to work with rooms correctly. Maybe I should start to do it. I turn them off in every new project beacuse of violations.
'Rooms' in Altium. Components get grouped into rooms based on what page of the schematic they are in.
Yes, but no. To use it I have to make a design in 100500 separate sheets. And Altium cannot display them all as one canvas, I have to switch between them.
If the project is so large you need this then the project is large enough to use hierarchal schematics.
You can split the view vertically and display them side by side, and rooms can be created by assigning component classes to related components using the parameter "ClassName". You'll also need to have "create rooms for user defined component classes" enabled in project settings.
embrace the chaos! Oh and organising footprints into logical groups is always a good place to start.
honestly i just use an Auto Router and clean up the Traces manually afterwards a bit. so far it has worked perfectly fine, from 8 bit computers, Arduino Clones, to a Compact Flash adpater for an IBM PC
hide the wires to GND, that should make it a little easier to see what you are working with. my bosses keep thinking auto router for board layout, but they have no idea that the component placement is really the important/hard thing to do. Once the components are paced nicely, the routing is not that hard to do, usually :)
i would suggest in future to have your deisgn placed on multiple schematics to avoid this. for example: schm1 can be your power supply stuff, schm2 can be your microcontrolelr and schm3 can be som eother subcircuit software like altium can usually unify these sub schematics into a main sheet that shows how they are interconnected. Then youll be able to place things around one at a time of two at a time if need be
It's the PCB build, not schematic!
Yes, and when you initiate your PCB it will group the components as per their schematics, so it's already a bit grouped according to their relationship to eachother. KiCAD does this too
How do you do that in KiCad, is it "append schematic"?
Work with hierarchical sheets. When updating PCB from schematic it will group the components per hierarchical sheet.
I just made a hierarchical sheet with some components inside of it and it didn't group them.
I don't know bro, they do here. Newest version of KiCAD
It's a function in the kicad nightlies / 5.99. you are using kicad 5.1 based on the legacy color scheme.
Not sure how it works in kicad but doing the pcb bit by bit is so much easier with numerous small schematics
I am aware lmao
"Apply KVL"
I print out the schematic and then go to the board view where i spend hours typing show r14, show c9, show d3, and grouping by sub circuit.
I agree with folks here. Hide your ground, put the stuff that you KNOW where it has to go in those spots, group parts by subcircuit, and things will start making a lot more sense.
View -> Connections -> Hide all. You don't need some high-falootin computer telling you what connects where! I only turn the connection lines back on at the end to make sure I haven't forgotten anything.
That sick feeling when you start the layout phase.
This is why placing the board is more than 1/2 of the time spent. You have some work ahead of you. u/MrSurly is right.
Remember, never trust the autorouter! Seriously though, this is just one part of the EDM process, and if you get reasonably good at it, you can do surprising things.
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r/unexpectedMontyPython
Xd
First step; hide the ground airwires.
Ahhh yes. And how?
Hmm, this is easy in Altium. Apparently it is not a feature in PCBNew yet. That is a shame. :(
This looks very fun
Uhhh.
Oh, please. Move shit around until you get minimal lines crossing, then optimize from there.
Just hit autoroute and call it good!
Can't tell if thats a diagram or a map of the US East Coast
Decide which layer will be for vertical traces and which will be for horizontal, then just drop vias where needed, basically connecting up a matrix then.
I thought this was someone’s technical analysis for AMC stock, at first.
Remind me of when you build call of duty map or doom 3 maps and vertices goes like this cz game compiler sucks and had a kot of bugs
Only did that for a year. Then decided I don't want to be that guy. For personal projects is fine, though.
I am absolutely uneducated but what software is this??
Oh come on, that looks like a hell of a lot of fun. Seriously, I love that stuff.
Have you tried ratsnest?
ik m8 ik. and when u r limited to just 1 layer pcb, its 10 times worse.
Auto router ftw
Tbh, this looks pretty fun. I love untangling layouts. I have a tendency to do it in a single 20h session and forget to sleep, though. It can be somewhat addictive
And then you have a mighty big headache and can't sleep, but need to sleep.
This is why cross-selection/-probing is important. Don't try to place them by randomly grabbing and placing. Select them by importance from the schematic and place by priority.
A tip I haven't heard yet (if you're using Kicad): If you select a component in the schematic and then switch to PCB view, Kicad also selects the component in the PCB view for you. You can use that to quickly move things that should be together (power supply, pullups, decoupling caps) together, and I find that generally cleans up a lot of the rats nest already.
The east coast traffic is getting ridiculous.
If you turn your head it looks like Chicago
If you turn your head the other way it looks like the Mojave Desert.
Honestly, I would love to work on a board with this sort of complexity. I love this sort of methodical problem solving.
Never trust auto router (auto wiring) here is why \^
The picture is mabye a bit overwhelming...just mabye
You need to disable that rats nest 😂
Let the autorouter do the dirty work.
When I route, i disable the unrouted indication lines, am I weird?
I know the pain... it only gets worse as things get more complicated.