its still awesome! would it be easy to invert the screen print to make this PCB white?
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matt's mind
NeX wrote:
its still awesome! would it be easy to invert the screen print to make this PCB white?
the PCB fabhouse will do that. you don't assign colors in CAD design. you tell your fab house what you want... say, green soldermask with white print, or white soldermask with black print
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kitsch wrote:
NeX wrote:its still awesome! would it be easy to invert the screen print to make this PCB white?
the PCB fabhouse will do that. you don't assign colors in CAD design. you tell your fab house what you want... say, green soldermask with white print, or white soldermask with black print
but i assume this will be going via BatchPCB which from what i understand only does green PCBs, so i am wondering if there is a way to cheat by having the whole pcb screen printed white to get a white PCB.
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Canada
NeX wrote:
kitsch wrote:the PCB fabhouse will do that. you don't assign colors in CAD design. you tell your fab house what you want... say, green soldermask with white print, or white soldermask with black print
but i assume this will be going via BatchPCB which from what i understand only does green PCBs, so i am wondering if there is a way to cheat by having the whole pcb screen printed white to get a white PCB.
Well, not BatchPCB for the motherboard, but something similar (probably 33each) unless I end up making a bunch of them at once. If I did a real order like that then I could choose the mask and silk colors. As far as inverting it goes, I'm not too sure about that. It would be a bit tricky and I'm not sure if the fab house would like that very much, but I'll look into it.
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Rolf wrote:
NeX wrote:but i assume this will be going via BatchPCB which from what i understand only does green PCBs, so i am wondering if there is a way to cheat by having the whole pcb screen printed white to get a white PCB.
Well, not BatchPCB for the motherboard, but something similar (probably 33each) unless I end up making a bunch of them at once. If I did a real order like that then I could choose the mask and silk colors. As far as inverting it goes, I'm not too sure about that. It would be a bit tricky and I'm not sure if the fab house would like that very much, but I'll look into it.
fair enough, white would be perfect if it could be done, especially for the new project, tho anything other than green would look awesome in a transparent case.
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Have to agree. Maybe a minor detail, but a white pcb would indeed look fab.
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Minneapolis
If you wanted to do a little extra work (IE, punish yerselves) you could order without soldermask (GASP) and then apply your own in whatever stylish color you wanted. Heck, you could take clear soldermask and mix in dye. Of course, you'd need to mask the boards etc etc etc. Lots of work for not very much gain. 
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Milwaukee, WI
I'm not usually excitable enough to do this but here I am. Any progress? 
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Canada
Theta_Frost wrote:
I'm not usually excitable enough to do this but here I am. Any progress?
Unfortunately, no. I've put this project on hold for a while, partially due to school, but I've also got some other exciting chip-related projects going on. 
Progress on all of my projects is either slow or stopped at the moment, but hopefully I'll be able to get back to work on this stuff in the near future. The motherboard is pretty much at the bottom of the list of things to do though and there's a lot about it that I need to fix/make better.
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Cleveland, OH
Started working on these yet? I want one!
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Canada
Sadly, no. At the moment I don't really have the time or money to invest in development, and lately I've been getting very bored of it very easily. That's not to say I've given up on this or my other projects entirely, but I'm not too sure about this one.
This board needs a lot of work. It needs to be completely re-routed, and I don't think an Arduinoboy is really enough to justify a whole PCB. I can make an Arduinoboy that's just slightly larger than my thumbnail to go in the case and it would be a lot cheaper/less work. I really need to get some other projects out of the way before I can get decide where this one is headed.
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Sweeeeeeden
Well, here's some sort of really old news on this. Months ago Rolf sent me the Eagle files for the project, after which I started to reroute the whole thing. I basically got stuck after rerouting the RAM chip between the CPU and the cartridge slot. Even though it took a dirty trick of rearranging the address lines a bit (which doesn't affect the functionality in the slightest) I'm pretty proud of how much space I managed to save. I even managed to get back the ground copper plate on the back (which connects to the "arm" on the display board).
Right now, I'm stalled too, however.
Before:
After:
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Milwaukee, WI
Awesome stuff. I understand if you don't want to work on it, but I think there plenty of justification to a project this like this. So much potential for upgrades!