requesting information on pcb files for beaglebone black and beaglebone ai

[Ramakrishna Bachimanchi]

Hello,

my name is Rama Bachimanchi and I am an electrical engineer working at Jefferson Lab (non-profit research organization). I have come across the amazing work you guys are doing and was looking into possibly modifying one of your designs to replace an obsolete ioc we are using (it's a kontron pc/104 no longer in production). I was able to import the schematic into Altium, but not the pcb design files. I am getting an error when tried to view the files using the free allegro pcb viewer. Would it be possible to update the files and also upload the ascii file, so that we can import this into altium. We are planning to replace the expansion connectors with pc/104 connector. If we get to work and finish the design, we will most likely share it with you(not sure, if this is useful for the community). Please let me know

Thanks,

Rama Bachimanchi

[Jason Kridner]

On Wed, Apr 22, 2020 at 10:35 AM Ramakrishna Bachimanchi <bach...@jlab.org> wrote:

Hello,

my name is Rama Bachimanchi and I am an electrical engineer working at Jefferson Lab (non-profit research organization). I have come across the amazing work you guys are doing and was looking into possibly modifying one of your designs to replace an obsolete ioc we are using (it's a kontron pc/104 no longer in production). I was able to import the schematic into Altium, but not the pcb design files. I am getting an error when tried to view the files using the free allegro pcb viewer. Would it be possible to update the files and also upload the ascii file, so that we can import this into altium. We are planning to replace the expansion connectors with pc/104 connector. If we get to work and finish the design, we will most likely share it with you(not sure, if this is useful for the community). Please let me know

I'm not sure what ASCII file is needed. If I knew, I'd be happy to export it.

For conversion to KiCAD, I created a cds2f text file: https://github.com/beagleboard/beaglebone-ai/blob/master/HW/cds2f_BeagleBone-AI.txt

When the KiCAD version is available, you might find it easier to import that into Altium:

https://www.altium.com/solution/kicad-pcb-design-software-free-download

 

Thanks,

Rama Bachimanchi

--

https://beagleboard.org/about - a 501c3 non-profit educating around open hardware computing

[jimvr]

Jason,

We also are interested in the Altium file export for the BBAI Rev A2, if you can do that export.  According to what I read, there are two methods from this Altium post:  https://www.altium.com/documentation/altium-designer/allegro-import-ad

Allegro Binary PCB Design Files

The Import Wizard can directly import and translate Allegro PCB files (*.brd) to Altium Designer PCB files (*.PcbDoc) when the Wizard has local access to an Allegro PCB editor installation – that is, when a licensed copy of Allegro PCB is installed on the same machine as Altium Designer.

The Wizard uses Allegro’s included file conversion capabilities to configure the design data for processing by the importer.

Allegro ASCII Extracted Design Files

Altium Designer’s Import Wizard can import and translate ASCII-based Allegro PCB files (*.alg) that have been created from a licensed Allegro PCB installation. The ASCII PCB design files are extracted from native Allegro PCB files (*.brd) by Allegro’s included file converter (extracta.exe), which is called by a special batch file supplied with Altium Designer.

Since Allegro binary-to-ASCII conversion is a self-contained file process, the Allegro installation does not need to be accessed by Altium Designer. The Allegro installation can be on any machine, and is only used to generate suitable ASCII PCB design files.

We have many Altium seats here, if you wanted to "use" a license to try the first method, I can create a temporary login to our license for Altium, however you will need to download and install Altium on the same machine.

If you can create the .alg file set, that may help us that want to view the board in Altium.  Altium has no problem with the schematic, that was a native import within Altium.

Please let us know!  You guys did a great job with that board design, and the support from your team, stellar all around.  Thanks.

[jimvr]

Jason,

One of our friends has Allegro and we were able to convert, so good there. However, I noted that the files on GitHub are for A1, is there a board set package for A2, or errata from A1 to A2 that can be shared so that we can be sure to understand what was left off?

I am having some IO pin issues right now, and it just seems like my A1 board is missing a signal or two to the cape header.  Plus I can see that the JTAG port is not right, two wires perhaps needed?

And if you are happy with this, I can send you the Altium project when done, and you can post that up?

Share?

[jimvr]

Jason,

Well, I was wrong, the dsn and brd files that are here, are not matching up.

https://github.com/beagleboard/beaglebone-ai/tree/master/HW 

I do see the A2 proposed changes, and I understand that the board files for that is not  yet available.

Can you confirm that the design set that is up in the github, match?  It could be just our conversion went wrong, and we need to figure that out.  The schematic seems correct to the PDF that we have from the same github.

[Jason Kridner]

The only part that shouldn't match is the logo (which we have stripped from the source). We have, at times, taken the source design and handed it off for manufacturing to be certain it matches. However, in this case, we relied on Embest to provide us with matching design files to the production hand-off. We can probably ask them to confirm the files are correct. I'm open to any further suggestions you have to validate it. Otherwise, we will validate when the A2 design is released from Seeed. I'm happy to provide the pre-release sources, but realize they aren't yet validated in hardware, so you'd be no better off.

--
For more options, visit http://beagleboard.org/discuss
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BeagleBoard" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to beagleboard...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beagleboard/b1800e47-87de-411c-ac2c-16e7f236be11n%40googlegroups.com.