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Here's the twist for me: Can I design my own? I've been reading some books on embedded design or making your own PCBs and they had tutorials in eagle. I took
by sown 13y ago
Here's the twist for me: Can I design my own?
I've been reading some books on embedded design or making your own PCBs and they had tutorials in eagle.
I took digital electronics courses and...is doing a schematic really as easy now for SoC design as it was for putting TTL chips on a breadboard? There's the routing that needs to be done, and I am SO SERIOUS about doing this, I will buy the full version of Eagle (Orcad is $10,000 or so).
I still feel like I don't know what to do, though.
- adestefan 13y agoSure. Modern SoCs are so integrated that its really just wiring up IO and maybe some flash RAM. A good place to start are the Atmel AT91SAM line of chips.
- sown 13y agoNeat. I looked at the Raspberry Pi schematic and it seems comprehensible, aside from my ignorance about the bcm2835. now i just need to pick a SoC. Are there any hobby/startup friendly HW vendors out there? The calxeda chip looks like what I would want. How to convince them to give me a sample, lol.
- mkhattab 13y agoIt's a lot more difficult than that. Perhaps designing a board around a low-speed microcontroller is easier for beginners but definitely not a modern SoC. One of the reasons is because most of these SoCs come in highly dense BGA (ball-grid array) packages and usually this means you'll need more layers to route traces on your board, which introduces more complexity. Another reason, perhaps the most important, is that there are a lot more pitfalls in designing high speed PCBs. Unfortunately, I do not know much more about this.