NOTE: This post is not finished yet but instead of keeping it as a hidden draft I have decided to publish it anyway - mostly to serve as a notebook to myself while I work on the project.

Introduction

For a while now I have had a desire to make a custom PCB for the MyC64 project, a board with suitable display interface and perhaps some tiny keyboard. Something that could be used in a handheld. A handheld FPGA based C64 emulator now that would be pretty cool.

Back in 2019 I did play a bit with KiCad making a very simple (through hole) PCB for PMOD like VGA interface but wrt complexity that is light years away from what I need to do now.

A board for the MyC64 will need to include the ECP5 FPGA with its, at least, 256 ball BGA packaging as well as HyperRAM 24 ball BGA and multiple other fine pitch surface mount components.

While I certainly need to learn a lot about board design and KiCad that bit does not scare me half as much as doing the actual assembly for those parts.

As a side not I spent some time during summer vacation to build a workbench for my lab corner where I can put all my equipment. This is how it turned out.

Workbench

The Plan

So to get started I thought I could begin with making a few rather simple PMOD boards for some of the components that I intend to use on the final board. This time actually following the Pmod specification. This way I get a chance to improve my limited KiCad and assembly skills along the way as well as trying out interfacing the components with the FPGA on the trusted ULX3S board. That seems like a sound plan.