Hi all,
Just an update.
We've finished PCB layout (ugh, finally!) and are sending them to a
fab today or tomorrow. Attached are latest files and 3D images of the
board.
I hope we'll be holding a working prototype in our hands soon!
Thank you all for your help!
--
Regards,
Alexander Chemeris.
Hi Jean-Samuel, Harald, Holger,
I've been quite for a while, so I want to make an update about the
state of our hardware.
On the FPGA development side we've been stuck for ~3 weeks, because
somethings happened with the power controller on our Xilinx SP-605
board and we've been waiting for TI's USB-TO-GPIO to flash this
controller. And now we're still dealing with this problem.
On the hardware side things are much better. We have "Release
Candidate" of schematics and working on PCB layout. We estimate that
layout will be finished in a week if we don't decide to change
something too much. In attachment you could find the latest versions
of schematics in PDF and Altium Designer formats, 3D view (pre-alpha
version), list of FPGA I/O and BOM. I would very much appreciate any
comments, questions, concerns and ideas about schematics, controls
placement, debug facilities, etc. It's much, much better to find bugs
and satisfy all requests now, then when we get PCBs printed.
Following the idea of Jean-Samuel we're trying to fit the PCB into
5.25" form-factor to be able to use various standard enclosures and
even mount the board into a standard PC cases instead of a CD-ROM
drive :) Right now estimated board size is 135х170mm, which perfectly
fits into 5.25" case.
Meantime I've created Google Code project to host our development:
http://code.google.com/p/umtrx/
It's empty yet, I plan to gradually fill it with information. I'm
happy to grant member rights for the project to any of you who is
willing to contribute to descriptions, code (not there yet), etc. Just
drop me an e-mail when you feel you need those rights.
--
Regards,
Alexander Chemeris.
