Routing the 3.3V power supply and starting the 12.6V to 5V buck converter!

ATTENTION: For some reason, Lookout bugged out on me and kept turning my main monitor off and on sometimes. So, for about 30 mins you do not see the progress, but I wrote what I did in that time in the journal. It's NO FRAUD, PLEASE DON'T count it as such or something, I don't wanna get in trouble...

In this session, I want to route the U1 chip.

Therefore, I had to find (optimize) the position of the components to get the optimal connections.

I actually didn't need much time to optimize and I basically only moved the components (R1, R2, R3) further up so that the other pins have more space and the voltage lines have a bit more clearance from the data lines.

After that, I started by connecting the SDA/SCL connections. But after starting, I thought of that I had to pay attention to the second SCL/SDA line that goes from U3 (the battery percent).

Firstly, I created the vias for the pins at the U1 chip and the pull-up resistors.

And then I also added the vias at the battery percent sensor.

And then I connected all 4 pins with the Raspberry Pi.

I firstly made the GND connections, and since there were plenty of GND pins, I decided to connect them with vias.

Then I added the last GND vias because I had forgotten that, and I also changed the thickness of the vias from 0.5mm to 0.4mm because that was the width of the pads for soldering.

After that, I made the 3.3V vias and connected them to the 3rd layer (power plane).

Lastly, I had to connect the reset pin with the Raspberry Pi, which I also did through the 4th layer (2nd signal layer) because the other tracks were blocking the way.

But then I found an issue with the connection because there was again no way through.

And after bringing the lines further down, it looked like that. And after connecting the line:

After connecting all with a 1mm track and the small track with 0.5mm, it looked like that:

(And here I don't know why the app just recorded only one screen for a couple of minutes, sorry) But then I was afraid that one pin couldn't power that many things. Also, another problem came up: the other power lines had almost no way around.

So I decided to use vias and bring them to the GND plane, but the vias were too small, so I decided to make them bigger: 1.0mm diameter and 0.5mm hole.

And after drawing and trying a bit with sizes and positions, and paying attention that it doesn't go parallel or so to data tracks, it looked like that:

And then I moved on to making the 12.6V to 5V thing. But firstly, I had to find the best position, and I looked in the datasheet to see how to do it best:

And after all the tuning, it looked like that:

But after all of the routing, I mostly followed the design from the schematics and optimized it to mine:

Tomorrow I'll hopefully finish the PCB, and then by the end of the weekend I'm finished with the project. Overall happy today, and till tmw!