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A project log for PDPjr

Standalone DIY 16-bit computer "PDPii Junior"

shaosSHAOS 07/13/2019 at 20:474 Comments

Finished main board design - it's 13.7 x 6.6 inches:

For the board I used the same Circuits.CC (my online tool for making simple schematics and PCB):

To make board image more readable I rotated it, moved to grayscale and inverted:

and even printed in scale (160 dpi) to see if components are fitting well ;)

Now I need to write C-program to convert my tiled pseudo-ASCII design to Gerbers for production ;)

P.S. Just noticed a few things to fix - probably 1st of all I need to write C-program that is looking for errors like interrupted wires. incomplete pads etc...

Discussions

Dylan Brophy wrote 07/14/2019 at 05:00 point

Wow, I didn't even know PCBs can or were designed that way, with the ASCII.  That's really cool.  Nice board too, by the way!

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SHAOS wrote 07/14/2019 at 06:02 point

Thanks :)
Actually it's slightly extended ASCII ;)
1st 30 characters were specifically changed to help construct PCB-like images
And last 14 characters are helping with schematics :)

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Dylan Brophy wrote 07/14/2019 at 06:08 point

That makes sense.  Seems similar to the Propeller chip's ROM font.  Just a random and absurd thought, but perhaps circuits.cc could be ported to a microcontroller like the propeller. XD Sorry, just had to throw that out there. :P

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SHAOS wrote 07/14/2019 at 06:16 point

Yes, it could :)

Significant portion of Circuits.CC is written in Robby programming language ( also mine ; )
See https://gitlab.com/shaos/circuits_cc/blob/master/src/CIRCUITS.R
And Robby has cross-compiler for Intel 8080, z80 targeting ZX-Spectrum and a few Russian retro-computers and it's relatively easy to add more target platforms / processors - see #nedoPC SDK 

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