AID Main board and peripheral card design update 040404

Lot s of progress on this one. At first we got held up trying to create a single sided board with a reasonable number of jumpers from the pin assignments we had originally conceived for the AID 8 Bit Bus. Eventually we realised we would have to bend our human logic to a logic which is better suited to the electrical requirements. Stefan and Mike finally took the leap and redesigned the 8 Bit Bus for the easiest routing and the results were so sublime that we decided to post the redesign for comments. Everbody agreed it was the best way to go even though it rendered our existing main boards and peripherals plus all documentation for the point-to-point design of the main board unusable. To remedy the compatability problem we came up with a conversion mapping and Erin built a converter that adapts the old 8 Bit Bus header to the new one.

Rob produced a test PCB of the main board which worked first time! We decided the traces needed to be thicker, the pads larger and resolved some component spacing issues in revisions of the PCB which will be etched this week the peripheral card PCB's that Rob is modifying today based on a PCB version Mike and Stefan had drawn up in proteus.

Mike