ZoneMikel's Blog

The two sided big jinx mainboard was kinda a disaster. With traces just .3mm thick and clearances of .1mm I think I was pushing it a little. I made the board but there were lots of problems, the outer traces got eaten by the echant was the main problem.

I had been thinking about doing a more modular design, but I had already started the other board and expected it to work. Anyway a modular design was kinda a fallback plan B sort of thing. It is actually better than the one board approach.

The modules are

• Mcu Board
• Power Board
• Ping Board
• Accelerometer Board
• Multiplexer Board
• H Bridge Board

The advantages of this modular design are

• Easier to make small one sided PCBs
• Easier to test modules separately
• Modules can be upgraded and replaced without effecting the rest of the modules
• Overall board size is smaller since they are stacked
• Much less connections on each board

I made each board have a male header that goes out from the bottom, on the main mcu board there are female headers to plug these boards into. Most of the boards have 6 or less pins connecting to the mcu board. If the boards connect to anything else (motors, batteries, etc) they have male headers on the top of them. This should allow us to make the modules stack on top of the mcu board and make the overall board smaller. By doing this we reduced the connections on he mcu board from 130+ to 70 ish.

I created all of the boards quickly in multisim then made the pcbs for all except the MCU and Multiplexer board. They are all etching as I write this.