Wakame Board, looking towards first prototype.
-
I am the developer of an arm computer board, whose name is Wakame.
I had develop this board mainly in an Altium 2009 running PC, importing what was an eaglecad project. I have been able to fix much of the problems that this transition meant and now i'm achieving between 85% and 90% of successfull auto routing.
The reason i'm posting this is that , when using the Show Differences tool, between Schematic and PCB i have around 70 small differences, regarding contacts, pins and other little things that are adding up.
My goal with this board is to use a single layer pcb , having all of the parts soldered on the surface, and, whenever traces cross each other, use zero ohm resistors or bridges. I'm about to achieve full autorouting should those 70 details get fixed, but i'm far from being able to resolve the issue of the bridges, because i do not really want to use two layer boards, given that Wakame is just an Allwinner a13 with it's main memory, it's eeprom, an onboard usb hub, an onboard usb to ethernet ic and a special ic intended to convert each of the 6 bit per r,g,b pcm outputs into normal svga output.
Other area i'm in heavy need for advice is the Firmware. I actually wish to have something like OpenFirmware in the eeprom and then get an os like gnu/linux called from a hard drive. In fact, i added two internal usb ports intended for direct attaching both usb hard disk and usb cd/dvd unit so it can boot from them as any desktop computer. I have seen projects like Coreboot, Libreboot, Denx's U-boot, but actually i'd like to have your opinion about wich one to use, and, when making a wakame bootable disk, very likely using mkisofs, wich parameters would best be passed to it for achieving a gnu/linux disk able to boot on this yet to be built machine.
i wish to thanks your support for projects like this one.
you can reach the latest files at:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6khpwdkIiGWM0JtUnpxOGxOa2M
it is an altium 2009 workspace.
-
@madscientist Not sure why you are against using a double sided board? A double sided board with VIAs could solve all your issues.
-
I'm actually having them using the 2 layers. much of the issues seems to come when i first created the components in eaglecad and then i moved all to altium. Please have in mind that i am yet learning how to use Altium properly and i think it has lots of tools for adressing those issues wich i think i'm missing because lack of deeper knowledge.
-
@madscientist
Any update about project?
-
-
Hello all
I beg your pardon if i took long to reappear, but i spent a long time trying to complete the board design. Even today it's still a work in progress thing, i had to resort to 3 layer autorouting to get it "finished", and i say "finished" because i'm still aware it needs some further development, but now it's a matter of building it.
The problem i have is: ended into a 3 layer pcb, but the goal of this project is to be a single layer bridged by wire linking board, so it can be made using normal electronic tools and not technology from outer space. i could even get the drawings of each layer wich i published into the github repository as svg files.
The problem i need to discuss is: how could 4 layers of wires be turned into a single one cutting the traces that would cross so they can be resolved by wire links?
You can see the svg layers here: https://github.com/temporaryuser132/wakameboard/tree/master/gerbertosvg
