hardware//manufacturing//PCB

A printed circuit board is the fiberglass-and-copper substrate that mechanically supports chip components and connects them electrically through etched traces.

A printed circuit board is the fiberglass-and-copper substrate that mechanically supports chip components and connects them electrically through etched traces.

A MCU or MPU sits on the PCB alongside passives (resistors, capacitors), connectors and power regulation. The copper traces connect the exact pins of specific chips and sensors, so changing a chip makes the board useless. Manufacturing involves layer stackup, drilling, plating, solder mask and silkscreen, and board complexity ranges from two layers on a hobbyist board to more than twenty on a server motherboard.

1Design the boardKiCad or Altium2Fabricate it in ChinaJLCPCB, PCBWay, about 0.50 EUR3Solder the components

Charging reaches the board through POGO pins (the small gold contacts), NFC or USB. NVLink on the PCB connects several Orin chips to scale out compute.

Advice26 · feb 05Read noteSuit the board's shape and size to the target device: its traces are laid for those exact chips and pins, so a board that does not fit cannot be adapted, only redesigned.