Wednesday, December 17, 2014

SLEEPLESS (IN SEATTLE) LAYOUT AND DESIGN REVELATIONS

With finals over, but a few days still left in semester, I took the opportunity to finish laying out what was aptly named the Nevcon Gen1.


I tried to condense the board into as small a space as possible, which meant I couldn't fit the optos and related necessities onto the board - at the very least I shaved ~$10 off the BOM, And with the relative abundance and swapability of arduino nanos, it's a feature that may be toyed with if a micro is ever soldered straight onto the board. Did I mention that the board is 3"x 2.8"? :3

Further, in cheaping out in the switching converter department, a rather unfortunate consequence was the requirement of a huge inductor. Not a huge deal considering passives come pretty cheap, but is pretty ridiculous when its footprint approaches that of your FETs.  



Speaking of FETs, they were moved to the bottom of the board for increased heatsink mounting capabilities. The arrangement appears promising, but seeing how cooling such a power dense object might be a problem, I'm quite inclined to ditch the fancy surface mount switches for some good-ol' TO-220s. 

To be continued...

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