Ordering a PCB with mistakes sucks. We should help each other avoid such mistakes – especially newcomers. One of the best ways to avoid these mistakes, especially if it’s your first one, is to get a few other people to look at it. You deserve to get a PCB that is as functional and as helpful as humanly possible, so that you can be happy with your project, and feel ever so slightly more confident in yourself in whatever you shall set out to do next.
At the end of last year, I put out a call for design review submissions, and we’ve received enough projects to make me feel overwhelmed for a bit. A design review has always felt like a personal thing, and here we are doing them in public. But in that sense, we hope that everyone can learn from them, and we hope to push forward a healthy review culture.
What’s more, these articles won’t just be design review. Every project I’m highlighting is worthy of a Hackaday feature just on its own, so tune in and learn more about them!
Today’s Contestant
For this example, I will be walking through a review I’ve already given someone with a pretty cool board, for a pretty cool project I’ve already shown you. Remember the Sony Vaio remake project? A fair bit of people have reached out to me afterwards, and one of them, [Exentio] also had the same Sony Vaio rebuild idea in mind. We started chatting, and he decided to tackle one of the project’s milestones, and perhaps the most crucial one – adapting the LCD.
Continue reading “PCB Design Review: DPI-LVDS Sony Vaio LCD Devboard”
The new display could have used the DSI (Display Serial Interface) adapter, or the small connector on the Pi that is not the camera connector. DSI displays are purpose-built for specific devices, though, and aren’t something that would or should be used in a device that will be manufactured for years to come. The best solution, and the design the Raspberry Pi foundation chose to go with, is a DPI display and an adapter that converts the Pi’s DSI output to something the display can understand.
