Vulcan PCB

Techniques

• Perf
• Etched
• CNC
• Commercial

Mega Breakout

By superimposing many of the common circuits that we will need we may be able to devise a few (or possible just one) board that can handle all of them.

There's only a few complex footprints that we need to support. Then with a sort of "bridge multiplexing" we can choose which sub-blocks of the board go to which pins of the more complex circuit.

If the small CNC (printer) can be made to output solder paste, it would be easy to manage the complexity. Even better, if it can do that and act as a pick-n-place we'd be set.

All-In-One

An all in one approach would have a board with a few complex footprints that map onto each other. Say it supports 4 microcontroller layouts (A-D), ranging from 20-40 pins. The pins would be connected based on similar functionality. So there would be a bank on analog IO, a bank of interrupts, banks of digital IO. Then a number of common sub-module layouts.

Breakout and Module

This approach would use more layouts but may be simpler and more flexible. Following the above, if we want to support 4 microcontroller layouts, there would be 4 core breakouts - one for each footprint. There would also be a few module boards. Each of these may support a few different circuit layouts that use different components but are topologically similar. The modules would all have a similar footprints, at least within a domain (so there may be analog footprint, a digital footprint.

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