Now that I have temporarily given up on the PCB cutter, I can move on and do some PCB design for the back plane and debug board.

I bought a ATmega128-16AI locally. I don't know this chip but I do know the ATmega1284 which I would have preferred.

Any way as the part number suggests it hopefully has 128kB of FLASH and can run at 16MHz.

I am hoping there is a bootloader available so that I can use it with the Arduino IDE. I have Atmel Studio installed but not everyone has that.

I better check first that there is a bootloader for this chip.

OK, here is a tutorial -

http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-on-all-sorts-of-Atmels/

And here are the bootloadres -

http://www.avr-developers.com/corefiles/index.html

I have been using ExpressPCB as I make single sided PCBs here and it has less clutter. Unfortunately it's not much good for SMD as it doesn't allow traces as a part of components and it cannot rotate by 45 degrees.

So I will make the first boards with ExpressPCB and then switch to KiCAD. I Also have Eagle but I only use that to view other peoples PCBs.

I will update with some PCB layouts soon. The backplane should be easy as it's passive.