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This is now an EAGLE-free zone!

A project log for rosco_m68k

A full-featured Motorola 68k retro computer, starring a 68010 running at 10MHz

ross-bamfordRoss Bamford 03/15/2020 at 21:470 Comments

I've mentioned before that I was unhappy with the way Autodesk now do licensing for their EAGLE CAD package, and that I wanted to move to something else (probably KiCad). No sooner had I mentioned this than the community said it could be done with relative ease, and @paulvdh supplied me with a conversion of the project as proof. 

Unfortunately I've had a few issues getting KiCad to work reliably on macOS Catalina, but I finally got it working perfectly and spent some time getting to know it, and I have to say I'm very impressed. I was a little apprehensive about "unlearning" everything I know from EAGLE and learning a new package, but it's actually been pretty straightforward. Having a pre-converted schematic I knew well has probably been a huge help :) 

I've now committed the conversion of the revision zero board to Git, and have made a good start on the revision one PCB. I started by working out the kinks in the converted schematic (for example, removing the control bus in favour of global labels since KiCad doesn't currently supported buses made of named signals) and now have a schematic and PCB that pass both ERC and DRC with zero warnings or errors, which I've committed as the initial work on the revision one board. 

After tidying up a few text-size and placement issues on the PCB and fixing some of the schematic component footprints, the revision one is looking like this:

(I've also fixed the issues I raised against the r0 board at this point).

The EAGLE files have now been consigned to (git) history - and it feels good to be using a completely open-source toolchain for the design of the project, without all the artificial limitations that EAGLE standard imposed.

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