Re: gEDA-user: cc2420 (ZigBee) board

[Hans Nieuwenhuis <hans@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

A few things about shielding. I'd suggest you put a ground plane over the entire board to shield the msp430 of unwanted radiation coming from either your transmitter or some external source. Don' t shield the antenna though :-).
You already shielded the radio part but it is better to also put another groundplane on the solder layer and drill lots of vias between (i.e. on a 0.1 inch grid) the component and solder layer. This will help avoid unwanted oscillations on your radio board.

I am not sure what you want to do with you antenna. Do you want to choose between external or internal antenna? On you schematics you connected them in series as on the board it looks like you can switch between them. 

Did you use gsch2pcb to produce the board from the schematics?

Regards,

Hans

On Fri, 2 Jun 2006 00:30:25 -0500
"James Cotton" <peabody124@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I have finished the first draft of a board with a CC2420 ZigBee chip
> and an MSP430.  I thought I'd throw it out there in case anyone wants
> to glace at or make any comments.  Especially anything about the
> antenna layout would be much appreciated since I feel a little lost
> there.  I'll post back once I get it fabbed if it works or not.  This
> board has a header for most of the MSP430 pins but really is just to
> test for signal integrity and allow a computer to be plugged in.
> 
> http://www.upload2.net/page/download/en7edvql1kPK2xR/msp430-cc2420.tar
> 
> Is a link to the .sch files and .pcb files as well as some of the
> symbols.  When it's finished I'll make a best tar file with all of the
> pcb elements too that I had to make (such as the pcb antenna).
> 
> This is loosly based around the CC2420DB reference design and
> SoftBaugh DZ1611 boards which I found schematics for floating around.
> 
> Thanks for any comments,
> James
>