Tips for PCB design?

A

Alessio326

New member
As per title,
I've been making my own circuits and boards for some years now and, since a really delightful experience I had right at the start, I've been asking myself:
How the hell do some manufacturers (including our beloved Robert) manage to make PCBs with perfectly organised and tightly placed components, without risking loud hisses, whines and weird noises in general?
I'm so damn careful with the position of both the components and the traces, I use a single ground plane (found out it's less noiser than placing a ground plane on both sides), what else can I do to reach such perfection?
I'm open to all kinds of suggestions.
Thank you 😭
 
I am not at all an expert here but I've laid out between 35-50 boards and none had the problems you've described (besides some hiss on circuits that are described as noisy in the original pedal). I make mistakes but it's usually mislabeled components or poorly sized footprints.

I basically don't use vias, try not to have crossing traces (usually a few are inevitable), have as complete a ground plane as possible on one side of the board, use appropriate width traces, try not to stretch power nets across the board. It takes some work and time in the layout but I'm not exactly scientific. And I sacrifice in some areas to have a "pretty", symmetric layout.

Note that I have not formally established that any of these things are actually helpful. I feel they make a cleaner layout and they kinda make sense to me... but I might just be cargo culting.
 
Alessio326 said:
How the hell do some manufacturers (including our beloved Robert) manage to make PCBs with perfectly organised and tightly placed components, without risking loud hisses, whines and weird noises in general?
Click to expand...

It doesn't always work out on the first try. Some PCBs take several revisions to get right.

The need for "perfect" symmetry is a weakness I'm working to overcome, don't stress yourself out trying to learn a bad practice.
 
z2amiller

Thread 'Pitfalls and Tips: Designing effects PCBs'

Pitfalls and Tips: Designing effects PCBs

Intro

Following up on my ‘Getting Started with PCBA at JLC’ document, I thought I’d create something similar documenting some of my big mistakes and learnings from creating these PCBs.

This isn’t my job or my background, I’m just doing this for fun and it’s all about learning-by-doing (rather, learning-by-making-mistakes-and-starting-over). But hopefully some of my mistakes (especially my repeated mistakes) can become someone else’s learning.

This isn't a "how to design PCBs" post - there's quite a bit of assumed...
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Symmetry is over-rated. Ease of build is under-rated.
 
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Symmetry is overrated...but sometimes you gotta do the aesthetic thing.

Honestly, it's pretty hard to make a terrible PCB if you just follow all the basics - avoid long parallel runs, try and keep big ground currents away from a ground plane, lay things out sensibly so you don't have heaps of additional traces you don't need, decouple op-amps, etc.
 
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