The Ware for May 2018 is shown below.
This month’s contest isn’t about naming a ware. Instead, the challenge is to guess the total amount of vias + holes on the NeTV2 PCB. The closest (or first correct) guess will get a DVT-revision of the board (same as the one shown above) as a prize! Please note: depending on your country of residence you may have to cover import duties or VAT.
At the end of this month, once the contest is over, I’ll upload the PCB source files to a public repo. The contest would be just too easy otherwise :)
I’m guessing 86 holes and 1255 vias. I think it would be possible to count most of them individually, but that’s not what I’ve done :)
888 vias, 69 holes
97 holes, 1276 vias. Yeah.
640
I think it’s easy to overestimate and guess too high. Despite having a 484-ball BGA chip, the board is relatively low complexity; only six layers and no blind vias.
It looks to me as the vias to route out the FPGA accounts for over half the total number of holes in the board, being somewhere on the order of 300 or so. Mounting holes and PTH parts at a glance appears to add up to less than 100.
My guess is that the total number of drill hits is 576.
Your own NeTV2? :)
Oops reading helps ;) Guessing 736 vias, 78 holes
My guess is 83 holes and 797 vias.
My guess is 820 total.
81 holes and uh, 484 vias :)
77 holes and 175 vias
My guess: 84 holes, 962 vias
My totally not an opportunistic guess is 68 holes & 450 vias.
Not a contest entry: what’s the deal with the tails on the PCIe presence short pins? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of making them short?
I guess you probably don’t care about hot-plugging, but still, is there some manufacturing reason?