Alrighty, this will be a pretty dense devlog, but it’s because I’ve been procastinating a lot of the work ;).

For context, the goal of this project is to develop an affordable bluetooth dac, that can also act as a standalone dac, and a bluetooth microphone. A dac or digital analog convertor is a device capable of converting digital signals to analog, which in my case is converting USB-C music to “audio jack” music. A common example is Apple’s dongle.

The point of this device is enable anyone with wired headphones to use them wirelessly. But, most people prefer wired headphones because you don’t need to charge them. So I thought why not allow them to be wireless when I need to(running, activity, etc), and turn them back to wired, when I’m sedentary, thus also charging them during wired use.

I began working on the schematic, and sourcing parts, and planning out the overall circuit around 3 weeks ago. And at this point I’ve probably spent over a hundred hours undocumented. But, better late than never, so here I am trying to catch up.

This work session was spent importing my schematic’s components into the pcb editor, where I noticed a few annoying things. Firstly, a lot of the componenets were footprints imported from EasyEDA’s library, which for some reason didn’t include access to the 3d files. I spent a good amount of time back and forth refreshing KiCad and importing the files, until they appeared adn I was able to import all of them.

Next, I was setting up the parameters of the board before I begin routing; things like layer stackup, differntial pairs, constraints, net classes. Here I found that I kept running into a problem where design rules checker complains about solder mask bridging between pads. After a bunch of research and troubleshooting, I realized I made a stupid mistake. The footprints I used for my resistors were 0201, where I meant to use 0603, wwhich meant they were all way smaller than they needed to be.

So I’ve fixed that, and now I’m deliberating a few things for the next work session. Mainly, I’m split between whether I want to use a 4 layer or 2 layer pcb for my design. A 4 layer design would simplifiy routing, and improve signal quality(and my ealier iteration was 4 layers too), but the main goal of this project from the start was affordablility, so in that regard a 2 layer board is significantly better option.

Anyways, that’s all for this log, future logs hopefully won’t be as dense. Thank you for reading :)

IMPORTANT SECTION BELOW(***for stardance admin):
Earlier today, I spent a 4 hour session(pictured below), redesigning my circuit schematic before I begin another pcb layout. I guess, there is some kind of glitch where lookout sessions aren’t connected to my project if the stardance tab is closed, while the session occurs. If any admin sees this, please comment a fix, because I’d like to claim the hours.