If you are going through this page, hopefully, you’ll have finished the schematic of your Sparrow OBC. This page will take you through laying out your board. You will be laying out your board on a 2-layer PCB. Why? SPRW-OBC-LayerStackUp
!!! MAKE SURE YOU’VE VALIDATED YOUR PROJECT !!!
There should be no errors under the panels → messages tab. You should see a message saying “Compile successful, no errors found”
Before going into layout, you should have a general idea of where your components will be placed on your board. We call this making a floorplan.
To start, think about how you want to place your MCU chip, as it’s a main component that connects to almost everything else on the board. Based on the orientation of your MCU, the placement of your peripherals will follow. For example, in this orientation of the MCU, it’s easiest to place our other components as shown below because they’re close to the pins they need to be connected to.
To make a great floorplan, figure out where your components connect together (physically; think about where the pins are on each component) and place them in a way that:
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A good tip is that you should group components as they are grouped in the schematic!
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Remember that you can rotate components as much as you like and place them wherever you want on your board. For this project, it’s also easy to make your floorplan by playing around with where you place your components on the Altium software itself, which we talk about in the next few steps.
Altium’s design rules are pretty conservative. What this means is that while manufacturers such as JLCPCB have the capabilities to design with, say, 0.1mm clearance, JLC PCB will flag an error if your components are around 0.5mm away from each other. We still do want to design above manufacturer tolerances but we don’t need to be as stingy as Altium tells us to be. The solution, read this page:
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