Beginning of the PCB. The big one. And planning.
Okay. So.

I imported all the pcb stuff and dear lord is there a lot of components.

So. What’s the first step? Sort it!

I sorted everything by schematic page and then within the pages by section/component. That way I know what capacitors and resistors belong to what just by glancing at my design.
During this sorting, I felt that my battery stuff was looking off. There was an excess of components and some weird duplicates. Turns out, I had accidentally copied a couple things that Ti included in their reference circuit that exist only for internal Ti debug. AKA, they are useless to me. So I went and removed those. Extra programming headers mainly, with some resistors paired with em.

It’s kinda goofy how big of a spot the battery connector gets but its ok.

Anywho, with that out of the way, I now had a sorted design.

You can see the clusters of components and whatnot.
Looking at it now, I realize that one of the usbc ports should be by the power circuity (bottom right) since it is part of that.

Not that you can read the words, but you can see stuff moved.

Here it is with ratlines by the way. Completely unreadable.

Anywho, game plan. I can’t quite figure out sizing but I can kinda let the pcb decide that. This is gonna be a bit of a thick boi but that’s alright. I think the mu will be on the back of the deck, not the front, as I can put a vent back there. And then the screen can go on the other side. I have a few requirements though:
Aim for a max width of 230mm. I have a lot more space in Y than X (x is the 230mm) to expand if needed, because of the screen.
External ports on the right if possible.
Antennas up top if possible.
Internal ports on the bottom if possible.
Mu somewhere in the middle!

That’s my plan for now. Obviously, I can change where things end up to fit my format better. But I think that plan should work out. I will need some usb male to female cables to make routing everything work I think. Mostly for the internal rtl-sdr.

PCB Time!