While I wait for the PCBs to make their way from China, here’s a preview of how the Roland System 704 VCA finished up, previewed using Kicad. Not sure about C6 now I look at it – although I think the red circle is the solder mask cutout, so it might not be so bad.

The service manual has the board layouts, but I wasn’t keen on just copying those straight out; it seemed more reliable to draw out the schematic and then route that with the parts placement and track layout as a guide.

Wanting to avoid learning potentially hugely expensive software (thinking of large boards in the future) I had got used to drawing schematics in Kicad, but the one time I tried to route a board using it before was tortuous.

I really wanted to use Osmond PCB – something to do with it being designed for OS X, and also the possibility of old-school curved tracks seemed attractive – but there didn’t seem to be a way to convert the netlist output from Kicad to Osmond. It seems that Designworks Pro might well output Osmond format, but it’s £150 less a penny. I don’t mind paying for really good software, but the comments on Muffs were hardly glowing.

I went through the convoluted process of installing the gEDA suite to try and use their converter program, but didn’t get very far with it.

Finally I opened up the output netlist in a text editor and realised it wasn’t the incomprehensible voodoo I thought it was, so I knocked up a quick and dirty program in Java to convert from the Orcad netlist to Osmond format. The workflow I’ve ended up with is probably not as smooth as using something like Eagle, but it seems to work ok.

Here’s another preview using Mayhew Labs rather lovely 3D Gerber Viewer:

In a fit of excitement because it almost seems like fun (although it takes me ages) I’ve since routed the 702 VCO and 705 dual ADSR, but I’m holding off ’til I get these boards to see if I’ve made any horrible beginners mistakes. Hopefully they’ll arrive this week, I’m pathetically excited.