I have no reason to make copper rotini tuning these traces so tightly since they're just carrying analog audio but they're differential so by the fanged god I'm gonna deskew these signals! It's good practice anyway.
(This is an analog audio I/O card I'm making so I can have front panel audio to plug in headphones and a mic, but it has two extra inputs and one extra output, so I put one of each on the back. It's probably violating some best practices but it's mostly for testing and the front panel audio on the box header is the most important part anyway. Also feel free to ask questions about my projects :3)
I upgraded from KiCAD 5 to KiCAD 8 this week because I was looking for font options and at some point they added the ability to use any font on your computer for text. Is 8 perfect? No. Do I wish they kept some things the same? Yes. Have I mostly tamed it into fitting my existing workflow? Also yes. One dark theme, some keyboard shortcut remapping, and some setting tweangling later and it's fine. Is it worth the upgrade?
My god the ability to adjust trace lengths AFTER YOU ALREADY ADJUSTED THEM is WORTH IT ALONE! You can adjust the squigglies afterwards to fine tune the length! Making the copper rotinis got so much easier.
Also as a note, if you're wondering why I have to do this again, I flipped the board so (almost) all the components are actually on the front. Wasn't too much work and it's a bit nicer in some ways (and only minorly less nice in a couple, such as not fitting pinouts on the front). Anyway, hope to wrap it up in a week or two and getting the board sent off to a fab. Will post photos when I get it.
I'm getting this really well honed aaaaaaaaaaaaand
I just realized that the whole DiMAS system driving design principal is basically "digital until the very last point it has to go analog" and now I'm wondering if instead of the box header there running analog signals to the front panel headset jack... what if I put the digital signals over it and put the codec right at the front panel connectors. What then, huh?!
While it would allow me to greatly shrink the board, that would mean no rear I/O, no internal line-in (as if you're gonna throw a 90's CD-ROM drive in this or whatever though), aaaaand I'd be running I2S and I2C over a ribbon cable, neither of which are really designed for that? ... But... more digital. I wants it. Mrm.
Yeah, try to figure out what the fuck is going on that changed between the last update and this one. xD
I'm gonna try to clean it up a little more then send off for the board and stencil to get made.
I have no idea if the audio codec works because I still need to program it, but well, the uC on it can be programmed. I had to upload the bootloader via JTAG (really SWD) then upload the firmware via USB, but I'm trying to figure out if I can do both with just SWD so I don't have to put USB ports on everything just to use Arduino libraries. (Microchip's dev environment for the ATSAM* chips is clunky AF otherwise I'd probably just be using that TBH).

