Low speed routing, mounting holes… we are done!!!

As the title of this entry suggests, this is the last entry of pcb design. I routed all the low speed traces, which was the only thing left. Besides mounting holes, which I did afterwards.
I started at the top left for this and worked my way clockwise around the board. Mostly. At some point I couldn’t keep track of what needed routed so I was just following what DRC said needed routed, working my way down the list. I started doing that about halfway through.

This sucked. I had to bob and weave and sneak my way around all the high speed traces, ensuring proper spacing to minimize cross talk and keep trace impedance correct. Having gnd pours or traces close to the high impedance traces changes impedance because of uhh… parasitic capacitance I think? Electromagnetic fields inducing inductance and capacitance. Something like that.

Anywho, lets see it!

Look at all that spaghetti. I had to route some traces on my power plane it was getting so busy! Good thing I named it power/aux signal.

This is the board with gnd pours on top/bottom. The pours are offset 1mm from all traces, which should be enough to protect the high speed.

Here’s the signal layer. Yes, I did route some diff pairs on this layer. They are usb 2.0 and do not care.

This is my power/aux sig layer. Mostly big ol power traces and pours, but there are a few signals mixed in that I just couldn’t get to route well on other layers.

And those are the GND planes!

With that, we have a finished board!

Well almost. It needs a bit of silkscreen.

That’s better. You can also see the mounting holes in that photo! I just used EasyEDA’s Pad feature to add pads with an OD of 5.8mm and an ID of 3.2mm. Should perfectly match M3 socket head screws.

So. Where do we go from here?

It’s cad time. I LOVE cad time. I need to physically design the deck itself! Which means exporting the 3D models of my pcbs, modeling out the screen, modeling a case, modeling all the internals, etc.
This is the fun part!! Pcbs are NOT the fun part.
So… CAD soon!!