Tuesday, December 26, 2023

Stacking PCBs

To have enough room on the voice card PCB, I think I will have to stack at least the Juno and Moog filter PCBs on top of eachother. But I don't want to pay for double sided boards and I don't want to solder the connectors myself.

Here are some options that I've come up with. All of them requires the filter PCBs to be mounted with their parts facing downwards:

This is probably the best option. It has a clearing of 5mm between the middle and lower board, and 4.4mm between the top and middle. Further more, we can increase this to 5.9mm by not covering the whole connector of the middle board, this is necessary as the Moog board has some 5.7mm high capacitors.

It also has the smallest possible space needed on the bottom board, 1.28cm (at least if parts on the bottom board are not higher than 2.5mm). 


It would be possible to put the middle board closer to the bottom, but this only leaves 2.5mm for parts and we need more space without parts to be able to slide the card in. It does leave a lot of space between the middle and top though.

This is a slightly more stable version of the first, as it uses a double sided connector on both cards. This will however steal more than twice the space from the bottom board as we need a lot of space to slide the card into place.