Justice Unlimited Gadget Circuit Board Design

PCB Design

I designed all the PCBs using a program called 'Pcb' which is open source. You can download it for free from Sourceforge or Harry Eaton's PCB Homepage. It runs under X-Windows on *NIX (Unix/Linux/etc). It is a great program which I highly recommend.

PCB Manufacture

The printed circuit boards were manufactured by Alberta Printed Circuits, www.apcircuits.com, in Canada. They had the lowest price I could find for our volume of boards we wanted. In order to reduce costs I combined all 4 circuit boards onto one rectangle. APCircuits encourages this (unlike many other manufacterers) and only charges the $40 setup fee once (otherwise it would be charged once for each board). We ordered 36 boards total. The plan was to make 34 of each circuit so we could have about 8 fail and still have enough for each of the 25 teams plus one for game control.

Here is the final layout of all 4 circuits

Click on image to enlarge

Notice how the Transmitter circuit uses up the extra space around the Bat Blinker.

Circuit Manufacture

We had a team of Game Control people help with building the boards. The experience level ranged from no-experience up to soldering expert. Many thanks to all who helped!

A Circuit Building Party

Soldering DRUID circuit boards

Adding Parts to a Bowl full of circuits

After the speakers were added

All DRUID circuits were given serial numbers for bug tracking purposes

DRUIDs with (3) and without displays attached

DRUIDs glued into the top of the case

Circuit Data

All the data needed to build the circuit boards is included in the file ju_circuits.tgz. It contains several files.

• druid.pcb - DRUID pcb layout for Pcb program
• trans.pcb - transmitter pcb layout for Pcb program
• blinker.pcb - Bat Blinker pcb layout for Pcb program
• resistors.pcb - Resistor Clue pcb layout for Pcb program
• combined.pcb - Combined pcb layout for Pcb program (includes all 4 of the above)
• combined_netlist.txt - netlist for combined.pcb
• all_front.gbr - gerber file for the front layer
• all_back.gbr - gerber file for the back layer
• all_drill.cnc - drill file (plated drills)

Cost

You can see our parts list and cost for each gadget here.

Feedback and Questions

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This file Copyright (C) 2004 by Nathan (Acorn) Pooley
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