Re: gEDA-user: cc2420 (ZigBee) board

["James Cotton" <peabody124@xxxxxxxxx>]

> 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 :-).

Yea, I can do that - Initially I was worried about having to route too
much on the bottom layer but it ended up being only a few traces

> 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.

Is there an easy way to do this aside from the tedium of manually
placing many holes?

> 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.

Yeah, in the schematic I had to connect the F-monopole to ground on
both sides to stop it from throwing DRC errors all the time since it
is a single piece of metal.  They are both connected to ground on one
end and depending which cap you populate selects the antenna.

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

Yeah, I had to delete the m4 directory though.  I have been using John
Luciani's footprints and a few I hand made.