Quote:
Originally Posted by grelbfarlk
Why not just throw the cash at Hese instead? I mean I'd rather support work that's already done by an Amiga guy and when he releases his design people can "degrade" it back down to a Rev B if they want.
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You can't just "degrade" a full, complex, digital computer motherboard from one revision to another. The Revision D board has considerable differences and routed entirely different than Rev B. It would be equivalent to a redesign, with all the work involved. Remember that the main goal of this project is to replace battery damaged boards. 99% of all boards are Rev B and not CR.
And forgive me but paying a professional firm, with production grade equipment and software, and several trained engineers who do this for a living seems a much safer bet for a good result, and completely accurate, and correctly made board than "throwing the cash" to one man hobby project (however competent, we have no idea if hese is a PCB layout professional). And his board is manually routed which is basically a different layout than the original, and it's unknown if it was done considering EMI elimination, noise, crosstalk, correct ground plane design, signal propagation etc.. There is much more to PCB layout than just connecting pads and vias, it's a whole science in itself.
There are modern PCB analysis techniques that guarantee fault free data, they'll run full test point analysis on the board to trace out all (or most) signals first, after which probably a combination of xray, and laminate separation (where they remove the substrate one by one to expose the next copper layer) for full mapping. This is a known automated process and the yield of these are close to 100% correct layout data, and the routing will not be done fully manual. So the result will be a near 100% replica of the original Rev B board, and wouldn't you agree that the original C= engineers knew much more about correct PCB design for their own hardware, than any "amiga guy" today (inlcuding myself)?
I would like to stress that by no means I want to belittle hese's work, which is wonderful, and by all means welcome to all of us in the community, all I'm saying, I'd love to see
guaranteed professional grade boards. There is place for both Rev B and CR.