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10/5/23 Update

A project log for 1802 MemberChip Card

A retro-microcomputer in a micro-package. Learn from the ground up, just like the pioneers. Has monitor editor assembler BASIC FORTH LISP...

lee-hartLee Hart 10/05/2023 at 19:370 Comments

I ordered PCBs from https://www.pcbway.com/ to test out my idea for bank-switching the MemberChip card EPROM to allow more than 32k. It's the first time I've used them. They were super-easy to work with, and even offered to sponsor the boards. :-) The PCBs look great and arrived quickly.

I was initially worried because their Gerber viewer had problems displaying my PCB. It looked like this:

The holes and soldermask were obviously in the wrong places! It turned out to be a consequence of my habit of including dimensions, names, dates, and layer identifications outside of the PCB outline in my Gerber files. In my OrCAD PCB layout program, it looks like this:

Once I removed all the extraneous information outside of the Outline, this problem was resolved. The actual PCBs came out beautifully, like this:

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