Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!cica!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!ginosko!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!thad
From: thad@cup.portal.com (Thad P Floryan)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Board Master Review
Message-ID: <20128@cup.portal.com>
Date: 4 Jul 89 23:38:55 GMT
References: <111571@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <19814@cup.portal.com> <112912@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 44

Re: Chuck's comments to my:

| >I "played" with it for awhile at the dealer's today (probably the same place
| >where Chuck bought his :-) and, like the PCLO predecessor, there's NO WAY to
| >lay down the footprint for real-world connectors such as DB-25, Molex, etc.

| Well the manual states "Buy some 2X artwork for these parts and stick it to 
| your photoplots." which is of course a cop out.

Yes, a cop out (on the part of the author of PCLO and Board Master).

Because I do a lot of PCB work and sell a lot of computers of my own design,
I want to briefly detail what this "cop out" entails:

- a lot of lines (aka traces) "going nowhere" on your artwork, until you
  manually use tape or a "good" felt-tip pen to connect the unterminated traces
  to the respective connector positions.  Good luck if you need vias and have
  to manually work on both sides of two-layer artwork.

- inability to do auto-routing to the connector(s), unless you lay down some
  artificial pads as "targets", then do your manual traces from those pads to
  the "real" connector pins' pads.  [ Can you say "kludge"? :-) ]

Chuck also says:

" All of the PC mount DB-25s I've seen recently can be fairly easily plugged
  into .1" perfboard. I suppose they may be straining the pins a bit though.
"                                           ^^^^^^^^^
Wow! That's an understatement! :-)  :-)  I've never been able to "bend" DB-25
pins to fit any of Artec or Vector perf-board hole-spacing.  Must be some
"trick" to this, akin to how one had to sit on the covers of some early micros
to align the screwholes while a buddy would insert and fasten the screws.  :-)

I'm not on a tirade here; the cost of PCLO has long since been written off as
a loss (taxwise).  I just want to caution people that there ARE some caveats
concerning board layout, and that one will encounter real-world "problems"
interfacing some components.  If you can live with that, then fine, just as
I originally stated:

>If you're doing "home" board layouts on which all parts are "digital" and/or
>have .025/.050-multiple spacing, you'd probably find the product usable.


Thad Floryan [ thad@cup.portal.com (OR) ..!sun!portal!cup.portal.com!thad ]