hideehoo
Experienced Member
As part of a recent estate sale, my son and I ended up with two Big Boards, one built, and the other almost completely bare. Stripped the bare one down, took a couple of scans on a large format flatbed and started doodling in Sprint Layout. Doesn't look to bad to replicate if anyone is interested in also rebuilding one of these on a new PCB. Couple of choices I foresee are
1. Uses 250 mil (6.35mm) spacing for all the decoupling caps. Tempted to reduce that to the more commonly available 5mm ceramic discs you find today.
2. Couple of traces are at a non 45 degree angles, so the layout will need to deviate a bit there.
3. Can't recreate the 45 degree crosshatching in Sprint for the ground planes. Should you even really be crosshatching these days?
4. The Chinese PCB fab blue soldermask I've got in the past is darker than the original Ferguson boards. Interestingly the built one that was exposed to the elements has changed color from blue to almost green.
5. Should I work things like the 4Mhz mode and other "improvements" into the design, or leave that to rework after the fact? I'm leaning towards keeping it original. The built one I have is a mess of rework wires and quite frankly I'm not sure what some of them are attempting to do.
Probably work on this over the next month or so. The built board looks really bad (stored in the corner of a garage), and I'm not sure I want to build the NOS one, so this seems like a fun way to get one of these up and running and build some new skills for replicating old PCB's.
1. Uses 250 mil (6.35mm) spacing for all the decoupling caps. Tempted to reduce that to the more commonly available 5mm ceramic discs you find today.
2. Couple of traces are at a non 45 degree angles, so the layout will need to deviate a bit there.
3. Can't recreate the 45 degree crosshatching in Sprint for the ground planes. Should you even really be crosshatching these days?
4. The Chinese PCB fab blue soldermask I've got in the past is darker than the original Ferguson boards. Interestingly the built one that was exposed to the elements has changed color from blue to almost green.
5. Should I work things like the 4Mhz mode and other "improvements" into the design, or leave that to rework after the fact? I'm leaning towards keeping it original. The built one I have is a mess of rework wires and quite frankly I'm not sure what some of them are attempting to do.
Probably work on this over the next month or so. The built board looks really bad (stored in the corner of a garage), and I'm not sure I want to build the NOS one, so this seems like a fun way to get one of these up and running and build some new skills for replicating old PCB's.