Quilter is offering free PCB fab if you try out their service. Tempting! Anyone here tried it?
1 Like
Cool! I haven’t, but I met a bunch of the team at DesignCon. Cool folks!
I have a project I’ve been dragging my feet on. Maybe this would be a good way to kickstart it. I think I would need assembly too though, so maybe that’s a dealbreaker.
This post actually made me bring my project back from the backlog. I got a lot of work done this weekend. I’ll update the post when I get a good candidate and let everyone know how it goes.
One odd thing, I thought quilter would move the components around, but it needs you to place them in their locations first. Though maybe I’m misunderstanding that feature.
The only thing holding me back right now is that I have some special considerations with grounding planes. It’s an audio board so I’m going to have an analog ground with a net tie to digital ground. I also need to remove the copper below an antenna.
I had not heard of quilter so this post caused me to take a look. I’m tempted to send it one of my board’s schematic to see what they can do.
But. I have to admit, I’m pretty skeptical. Especially with placement being required. Autorouting has never impressed me. I route by hand and do not find it THAT hard so the benefit doesn’t seem very large. Maybe I’m missing something? Do they do a better job than a moderately experienced designer?
It’s perfectly fine to use the same ground plane for digital and analog, as long as you don’t pull signals through the other domain.
Having a net tie creates a choke point that can increase noise, especially if you have any mixed-signal circuitry.
Just my 2 cents (got burned by split planes earlier in my career. Never again!)
@KaiK that is great news cause it sounds like a pain! The devkit that I’m basing this on uses a net tie. I’m cautious of straying too far from the example in this case. Although, I can see that a different devkit uses a common ground technique, but I don’t have those Gerbers so I can’t really confirm, and thus feel less confident with that approach. Maybe the issue is that it’s an audio amp. I paraphrasing the datasheet which I don’t entirely understand but it basically says “there’s an internal charge pump which generate a negative ground.” It’s the MAX97720C. It’s for internal development, so I don’t need perfection. It might be worth the experiment.
@phil_from_seattle I agree with you. I’m tempted because I’m more of a firmware person and I haven’t done layout in 10+ years. Even then, I don’t see this saving me a lot of time. I submitted my first attempt and the AI was taking forever. While I waited I actually made a lot of progress.