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Compact two-board PCB stack
I designed a PCB around a schematic I'd already drawn up, with the goal of keeping the whole thing as compact as possible. Laying it out turned out to be the hard part: the board is dense enough that routing became a real fight, and I ended up splitting the design across two PCBs connected by headers, using the vertical space I had available. After wrestling with the routing on the second board, I found a solution and planned to finish routing and order a few.
Description
I started from my PCB schematic, and ran into significant issues laying it out because I wanted the board to be compact. One thing that helped early on was realising I could just remove the pins I didn't need, but even then I wasn't sure I could make everything fit.
Nicolas Mattia suggested splitting it into two PCBs connected via headers, since I had plenty of vertical real estate. That's the approach I went with, though the boards are so dense that I still couldn't route the pins for the second PCB. I did find a solution in the end, so I'm finishing the routing tonight and ordering a few.
Gallery
2 images
