Schematic Capture

Plugging away at schematic capture. I hope to be done by the end fo the day Thursday. I have stopped for a little while to work on researching the audio codec interface. Hopefully I can finish figuring that out tonight or tomorrow morning.

Auto Part Generation Success!

Here is a picture of the Blackfin made using my auto-part generation for PADS PowerLogic from .csv files using Ruby scripts. (the part has not been modified at all, this is exactly how the auto part gen created it) I need to clean up the code a little and make a good fron end for it, but this tool has already saved me a lot of time. Hopefully schematic capture will be finished soon. If you have interest in this code e-mail me.

Creating Parts

Spent most of the day working on a program to create symbols from .csv files.

How to put a part in a computer

Since many of the design questions were cleared up early today I started to move ahead with schematic capture. I was able to get the ez-kit lite files from analog and the board was routed in PowerPCB which allowed me to look at their design and capture their geometries. An image of the board can be seen above. Unfortunately, I was not able to access their schematic symbols which is why I downloaded the files in the first place.

I looked around the internet for ways to get the existing schematic symbols from the ucLinux team or from Analog to convert into PowerLogic, but I couldn’t find a way. I did run across a tool for generating parts using excel files that looks promising. Unfortunately, the tool does not seem to be free. I e-mailed the company to inquire about licensing. I may just need to write my own tool or figure out how to input symbols faster.

I also pursued information on the handyboard and found that they will be releasing schematics in the fall. Their board is going to cost nearly $600 dollars a tad bit more than our $45 board. Their schematics may be useful in design when they come out, but we should have prototypes out by then.

I think that we may be able to make the board useful for both one and two chip memory configurations by swizzling some wires, I am still investigating this though.

I am also still looking into the USB design. We may be able to add more features since we have switched to the cypress chip. I need to investigate how to hook the cypress chip to the CPLD and the JTAG port on the Blackfin.

Meeting 08/24/2006

Minutes from meeting with Don Heer:

• PCB Layout Software:
  • Continue to use PADS
  • BGA pins will be named with numbers (i.e. 1001 for A1 and 2011 for B11).

• USB:
  • Move from FTDI to Cypress CY8C24794 and add programming functionality
  • Connect JTAG Pins to Cypress Chip for USB programming
  • Cypress chip also allows some extra analog inputs

• Memory:
  • Go ahead with single chip for memory.
  • Saves board space.
  • Cheaper.
  • Less flexibility for future memory upgrades.

• Audio Codec:
  • Proceed with cheaper codec.
  • This requires changing the system clock to 12.288MHz.
  • Need to decide between static and serial configuration.

• CPLD
  • Use the faster 7ns part to accomadate the system bus speed.

Other Items:

• Find price of Blackfin Handy Board