That is an excellent suggestion!

That is an excellent idea! I'll implement that from now on in my projects. Thanks!

Isnt that essentially how USB was made reversible

Thanks John! I'm always a but nervous powering for the first time.

Should I feel bad?

@@weirdboyjim Of course not! I am a grown human making my own poor decisions. 😁

Great to hear you have been enjoying it. It's been a long road to get this far.

Glad you like! But how would you feel if I went strait to pcb?

I'd be vicariously nervous, lol. The breadboarding is much more agile for proof of concept. It does have the signal speed limitations though, so for high bandwidth stuff it may not be an option.

Interesting, I'll give that some thought. It would be easier to justify if I was making larger modules.

@@weirdboyjim Yes, I guess it depends if the end goal is to offer the boards as a kit. With the backplane obviously that almost completely negates issues, but if people are wiring the boards separately, then there will be inevitable puffs of magic smoke from some :) I have PCBA done in china for my production and prototype designs, with final assembly in the UK, and started adding more protection due to mistakes by people on the assembly line here. Some of the chips on my boards are pretty expensive though, and never seem to survive reverse polarity, so it's a bit different (also had problems with them using bench supplies to test, set to the wrong voltage, so also had to protect against that :) Great series by the way!

Thanks!

Thanks Frank!

Thanks Seon! I always worry about that, although maybe I'm in luck credit after that mistake on the giant backplane board.

It's a great tool with a low barrier to entry!

Thanks Yorgle!

We are indeed spoiled! Not to mention high quality manufacturing at low price!

Thanks George!

I had very little electronics experience when I started, anyone can do this with some patience and practice!

Glad you like it!

Glad you enjoyed it

My bad, sorry. 😉

Thanks! Did you see my various Beam Racing demos?

Thanks twobob!

Good to hear you are still finding my stuff interesting! Hope your build goes well!

I really wouldn't want to attack a board like this with the auto router. I find the very process of routing it tends to identify some issues and I can adjust bits of the circuit in ways the autorouter can't. Besides, I'm not one for the easy path.

@@weirdboyjim More content doing it your way as well haha

It will stay as separate modules, but there will be a final combined backplane for all the vga modules to plug into. A final (fixed) backplane for all the cpu modules to plug into and a final backplane for all the other peripherals (UART, Audio, SNES controller etc..) to plug into.

Ohh, do you have a link for that? I've seen there is a more recent version but didn't know there was an upgrade. I've been thinking about trying to pull one of these apart and merge it with a reflow controller.

Scrap that! You're only making 2-layer! 😁 Your "internal planes" comment confused me! If only I had waited 2 minutes longer! 😁

The Tile Data board is 4 layer, the 2 internal layers are power and ground. I'm going to be honest George, knowing your experience I'm more inclined to think you question means I'm either explaining myself poorly or doing the wrong thing. I only get a connection to the internal planes from a via (or other plated hole) so I still have to make sure they are connected. I've also been advised that it's better to have a component side trace from the the decoupling direct to the power pins so I try and do that. Finally if I see a little blue rat line and a clear way to connect them I can't resist adding the trace even when I know a later via to the plane will do it.

I'm very sorry for not failing well enough!

@@weirdboyjim Maybe for next time throw in a few reversed biased tant's caps for that added WoW factor. 🙂

It does feel to me like Autorouters should be better than they are. If I had spare time I might take a crack at creating an open source one, it's a similer class of problem to group pathfinding in game development.

@@weirdboyjim It certainly qualifies as an excellent puzzle to solve. (Edit: and that's a brilliant idea for a parent algorithm - perhaps a lot of code could be inherited)

I've fixed that. Thanks.

I'm not an expert on this stuff, but someone who definitely knows more than me told me that vias should be regarded as having a greater resistance than a trace so if possible connect the power lines of chips to their decoupling directly.

​@@weirdboyjim Intriguing. Im not saying they are wrong, but every "professional" PCB Ive ever looked at doesnt seem to go to that trouble? A quick bit of googling and some calculations online seems to suggest 10-30mOhm is typical for vias, but an 8mil trace over 0.5inch is about the same (high 20's mOhm). Increase the trace width by a factor of 10 and the resistance drops by a factor of 10, so it would seem you really need fat traces for it to make much of a difference? Im sure there are applications where it matters, but that its one of those "if you know then you *need* to know" kind of things lol.

@@TomStorey96 it’s not uncommon for me to get conflicting advice, it would surprise me if this advice was wrong but I may not be describing it right. I went back and looked at the pcb design, there really isn’t that much vcc/gnd traces beyond connecting to vias.

@@weirdboyjim Im sure you get all sorts of ideas and suggestions thrown at you. In the end, the important thing is that it works.

the "JLCJLC..." is a marker for JLCPCB as to where they can put their production serial number, if you check later in the video it's been replaced with a there own id for tracking the board through stages of production. You absolutely could do that with the PCB pins BUT this testing is as much about my soldering as the design itself so doing it that way doesn't cover all my test cases.

18:25 shows the JLC numbers

If it works it works, I wouldn't want to use it for the main circuit. But I did autoroute the test board I plug it into.