Offerman IndustriesMirroring back plate in! It's a laser-cut acrylic mock-up for the silicon wafer that will eventually become the back plate of the VFD stock ticker.
This took quite the effort: a board measuring 28x26cm, with 373 components, 600 nets, and 4033 track segments. The design is rather excessive, but the whole idea is to give this board an exposed old-school look. Very happy with the current esthetics! 😍
All looking fine visually. Will add zones to the board in a later stage.
Have also worked my way through all DRC messages, so this one now ready for a first fabrication.
Things are starting to look like something: got all my parts roughly where they ought to go.
Happy with the looks of it. The idea is to eventually cover everything in conformal coating and keep all components exposed like this.
Detailed placement and routing is gonna take quite some time though, just like testing and writing software.
So it begins: I got all my 3D models complete, ready to start the layout. First order of business is to distribute all the components over the board. It's clearly gonna be a tight fit, but I think we can make this work. Hopefully everything can be placed on the front side, as the aim is to show as much of the components as possible.
refreshed part of my VFD display tube collection for KiCad: Defined some new Materials specifically for VFD/radio tubes and used these to set the Material and Appearance properties of the various parts and some individual Faces.
