Rearranging the ossc board

[vgdiy]

This is mainly for marqs, but anyone can feel free to chime in. I do some hobby pcb design in my spare time and Im thinking of rearranging the ports on the OSSC. Looking at the kicad_pcb files I had a few questions.

1) I noticed a lot of ground vias sprinkled on the board is this mainly for EMI purposes? Just to stitch the ground planes together and to get a better fill on the ground pour?

2) It doesnt look like the OSSC was routed using freerouting. Or was it some half and half auto routing and some manual routing of the signal traces?

3) Will the IT6613E get swapped with the ADV7513 in the next version of the OSSC?

4) Is there a reason the OSSC uses 3.5mm jacks for analog audio instead of rca jacks?

[marqs]

1. The purpose is to get good ground continuity all around the PCB

2. It was 100% routed by hand since when I started the project Kicad wasn’t mature enough (at least in my opinion) so that I could have comfortably relied on autorouting result. Of course it might have been enough to hand-route only the critical signals, but on a PCB of that size it wasn’t huge amount of work to route everything manually.

3. I’ll be trying ADV7513 with cps2_digiav project, but ideally HDMI TX would be implemented on a higher-end FPGA that has suitable transceivers. Unfortunately such solution requires HDMI subsystem IP that’s not freely available as far as I know. I’m not sure if any new dedicated HDMI chips (or their documentation) will be publicly available in the future, making things much harder for hobbyist projects like this. Even ADV7513 is no more openly available on Mouser.

4. I’m not big fan of 3.5mm connectors either, but the purpose was to keep PCB size minimal.

[Author]

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