Melt your circuit boards

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[ZackFreedman]

I’m convinced. The age of buttery smooth circuit boards is now. Real traces have CURVES.

[rebane]

The efficient routing looks like one of those datacenters with a million ethernet cables going from switch to switcu

[jimBobuu]

As an avionics repair tech, I have sense of dread every time I see rounded runs. It has nothing to do with the runs but rather the age and tolerances of the components. Every board that was hand drawn is a monster to troubleshoot. Even seeing the melted boards in this video gives me that sense of dread.

[xyzzy]

4:40 this is not the only argument against this type of design. It's also harder for a human to follow the traces and therefore increases the difficulty of repair.

[andrewdreasler]

1:30 I would argue that MOST styles are 'born from limitations, ' The gorgeous angularity and serifed fonts of Roman writing came from the limitation of having to chisel the characters into stone, and the 70's era 'checkbook font' that helped define what was futuristic in that era was born from making a font that was both human-readable AND readable by a machine scanning the magnetic ink at high speed.

[burt]

You can talk track routing plugins for KiCad whenever you want 🙂 I'll be here for it.
The concept of "lowest possible energy" is something that I deeply appreciate, as both a programmer and a lazy person.

[Mister_Brown]

i find smoothed tracks allow for much faster cutting of diy pcbs on an engraver, smooth corners having lower acceleration than right angles.

[RubenDax]

Definitely thought I was going to be watching you throw a bunch of PCBs into a furnace but I was happily surprised that instead it was a KiCad plugin. Super easy to install with the package manager and awesome one-click results. Thank you!

[Mr_Happy_Face]

Love the idea of the teardrops being “dipped in honey”

[darkfire]

One other problem I could see with highly optimized tracks like the ones you get with TopoR is maintenance. Those layouts are much harder to comprehend and to check for humans when you are searching for problems, both during design debugging and during repairs later

[AhmedHan]

Old engineers are still debating with me that 45 degree tracks are the best choice. I heard this from even an RF engineer. Thank God, I can find videos like this to ease my pain.

[akleja]

This is super neat, as a KiCad user I will definitely try the plugin. Thank you! I always loved the old hand drawn PCBs.

[rayoflight]

I began making PCBs in 1975 with tape and a razor blade; both directly on copper for a single job, or on a mylar sheet to make multiple copies using positive photoresist.
I experimented with curves and 90° and 45° angles. The end result was I made curved tracks for my personal projects, as curves were faster to draw and more reliable in the ferric chloride solution. But all customers loved angled tracks and the "professional" aesthetic of the finished PCB.
I transitioned to ORCAD x DOS around 1988, and curved tracks were gone by then. My designs went up to 200 MHz operating frequency, and I never found any increase of EMI / RFI when compared to a rounded-track PCB. Over the years, I forgot about those wavy PCBs, with long strings of FND500 displays or arrays of memory chips crossed by waved tracks drawn by hand.
Now, watching this video, I transfixed what I saw. You are trying to get good old wavy PCB tracks out of modern PCB routing software! I'm honoured. I bet you listen to music from vinyl disks with a Shure cartridge and a DC-coupled audio amplifier...

[Ultigen]

The design of the Topor boards is super interesting. Its how I imagine a computer building itself would arrange its own traces. Ruthless efficiency in an oddly organic aesthethic

[silverXnoise]

There is another valid argument against the ruthlessly efficient routing approach (and for the record, I’m with you, I think it looks neat): it is more difficult to grasp it’s logical structure and discern how things may function, which on some (not all) designs, could hamper its ability to be iterated, improved upon, or repaired.

[rageagainstthebath]

As a junior engineer at my first job I designed my first PCB with free angles, being inspired by audio equipment of the 80s. That was indeed like placing rubber bands in PADS. I collected a harsh response from everyone who saw my design, going as far as denying me a promotion, probably because of that, and other acts of not conforming to peer pressure. Now I work in space industry and already proved myself numerous times. I admit that while switching jobs I give a clear warning that I'm not taking any orders or advice that have no solid reasoning behind it. Excellent video, got subscribed for more.

[chrisjones-fpvd]

the animations at the end were amazing

[alvarodiaz]

I actually clicked this video expecting to hear that some type of old circuit boards had easily recyclable material that one could recover by melting it. I'm not even mad, very interesting content.

[TruDruChocolateMilk]

New video let’s go!!
The renders at the end were very cool

[Artichoked]

This video is clear, informative, and have a story-like quality that kept me hooked until the very end. Keep up this amazing work!