Placement
For placement we started by grouping things that were extremely location critical into groups. For example, the oscillators and decoupling capacitors for each MCU must be placed as close as possible to the MCU itself. Next headers were grouped by type and their corresponding microcontroller. Looser components were kept loose at this stage, for example, the power on LEDs could be placed pretty much anywhere.
Next each group was rotated and translated to determine the best way to combine each group to ensure that the traces could be as short as possible. Loose components were ignored for the time being.
After that, the major groups were condensed together and groupings were slightly adjusted to allow for a smoother integration together. The smaller loose components were used to fill in the gaps and tie the whole thing together.
Finally, the silk screen pin 1 markers were adjusted and designators were tuned to be in legal positions. This involved moving a few components in order to make space. We used 50mil height TrueType text for the designators as this is small and easy to read, it also looks a lot cleaner then the default text.
Routing
Currently in progress
Board Specifications
Currently in progress