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A project log for Goniometron the Flexinator

As you bend, so bends the board. The board bends in many fields, and with it bends the truth. The truth passes through the air.

justinbrowejustinbrowe 04/15/2019 at 23:260 Comments

The angles made the a particularly tricky board to lay out because of the angles. To route the traces on the angled flanges, I measured the angle in fusion360 and rotated the entire board to align the angled flanges with the x-axis. Eagle had a bit of roundoff error that would create design rule violations when I rotated the board back after routing the traces, so I had to micro-adjust the traces (or more often the board dimensions) to correct them.

I suspect that bending the antenna might change its behavior - I will have to test that once I have the boards - I should probably add in a U.FL connector to make testing a bit easier.

normally for a 2 layer board I would stitch the top and bottom ground planes together with vias along the edges, but 1) I didn't have a lot of space for that, 2) the weird angles made it difficult to get even spacing, and 3) I was worried that putting a bunch of vias right next to the edges that I was going to be bending might cause the board to tear instead of bending. Instead of stitching the ground pours together around the edges, I just stitched them together in a grid.

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