Hi, I am working on an audio processing project using a chip which has audio codec embedded, after coding and testing on top of it’s developing board I will have to customized the board to suit my particular use.
The chip maker provides the board files, but my PCB design skills only limit to KiCAd, from some search results I guess the design might be from orcad, but due to limited resource and experience, I am not able to verify my guess so far. I know there are a lot of talent and well experienced people around here, I have learned different knowledge by following the forum, this time I’d like to directly ask for advice on my guess work and preferred way to convert the board into KiCAD format.
KiCad has the ability to make a PCB out of a set of Gerber files, but the conversion is far from ideal. Together with the schematic in .PDF is is possible to reverse-engineer this into a complete KiCad project. Doing so is not difficult, but a lot of work. It may be one or two days to do such a thing.
Thanks Paul! I have seen some discussion in the forum here about getting back PCB design from gerber files, it’s possible an option for the conversion. The chip family has several variants, different internal SPI flash capacities and pin out, it would be good if I can carbon copy the dev board for testing and then use a smaller chip to reduce the pcb size for production. I am a lazy person, and prefer some tools to do the work if applicable, so that won’t hand draw the symbol and foot print twice.
Thanks jos, the chip I choose has internal audio codec and DSP core, and I can use standard DSP library to do some digital manipulation, the integrated codec also can help reduce layout related noise, this is one of the reasons that I prefer to reuse some of the original design
I see. In this article I posted they actually praise this NUC505 as an alternative as well.
That leaves you key in the schematics from your PDF.
It will be some work but well worth the effort
