Terry Swanborough RiscPCB Video

For a linited time only you can watch the video of Terry Swanborough demonstrating his PCB design program at the recent MUG zoom meeting.

You may have no interest in making you own boards, nonetheless the video is fascinating for what Terry has to say about the early days of RISC OS, and trips to Tottenham Court Road to buy scavenged electronic components.

Reminiscences aside there is in depth coverage on how to use RiscPCB and how to get your design fabricated for surprisingly little cost.

As mentioned at the start availabilty of this video is time limited as I have exceeded my Zoom Cloud storage limit. It could be removed anytime.

Almost forgot,
here is the link

wrong passcode

Check your typing. Works for me, but…

Si..te…is…hor…ri…ble….bu…ffering…bu…ffer…ing…

I gave up after thirty seconds. Netflix and YouTube work fine. Zoom is dreadful. And even worse the video link is obfuscated so I couldn’t even toss it to ADM to download a copy to watch without the hiccups.

At any rate, the passcode is good.

Update – switching to desktop mode, there’s a download link. Looks like it’s a 1.9GB (?) FHD video. Well, if it’s trying to toss it at me without noting that my bandwidth isn’t really up to doing that, it would explain all the stuttering.

Very odd, however, that a video conferencing system doesn’t appear to cater for adaptive streaming.

The link appears as
https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/K0uyS8Uo8xFeTkCvDhy2jxZPJTXcLIsS9JxkHcGK7-5VPK3RUAXU8Gnzv77glBbX.eYTeOx9t6GuGlVs7
with a passcdoe Gs$@#3z? – the passcode is wrong.

@Chris: That passcode is working OK for me.

It would be nice if these Videos could be put on DVD/memory cards.

Perhaps bringing in some extra cash for the Clubs.

I wonder if there’s some sort of scripting involved?
As you might have guessed from my previous post, I got to the video by copy-pasting the link in Firefox (Android). Thus, the passcode is clearly not wrong.

I get the message ‘wrong passcode’ when copy and pasting it into Firefox (Windows 7).

I get the message ‘wrong passcode’ when copy and pasting it into Firefox (Windows 7).

It’s a stab in the dark, but just check that you’re not copying and pasting in the carriage return at the end of the line on the webpage.

I’ve downloaded a copy of it and am happy to host it. Are you OK with that, John?

It’s a stab in the dark, but just check that you’re not copying and pasting in the carriage return at the end of the line on the webpage.

Well spotted, it’s now working, thanks.

hopefully the video was helpfull to some.

We have been locked up for nearly two years so I’m definitely out of practice
with public speaking not that I do much of that today anyway I get to hide in a lab

The talk meanders a little I had nothing written down but I did have some Blue Peter type examples “heres one I made earlier” and I did lose half a day remininscing after crawling around the loft looking for the Atom computer. “Nostalgia isnt what is used to be :-)”

I’ve downloaded a copy of it and am happy to host it. Are you OK with that, John?

Chris, Thanks, but please hold while it is still available from the Zoom link.

Why not put it up on YouTube, WROCC put all their meeting videos up on YouTube.

Why not put it up on YouTube, WROCC put all their meeting videos up on YouTube.

It is a good suggestion Chris, but it’s a question of how much time I want to spend on editing it.
The video as saved by Zoom is too big for YouTube. It is close to 2GB. Last month when I added the RISC OS Git video to YouTube I got a message from YouTube saying the limit was 150 Meg. It took me 5 or 6 hours to edit the original video of 800MB down to an acceptable size and it lost some definition in the process.

I got a message from YouTube saying the limit was 150 Meg

Huh ?

Is your YouTube account unverified or something? The half hour video where I talk about my trip to Rennes, and some location video, came to about a gigabyte and a half.
My cheap Chinese amplifier review, about 700MB.
Talking about my vaccination, 950MB (I wiped the original, needed the space for Queen MP3s ;) ).
My main problem is in how many eternities it takes to upload with a ~750Kbit upstream link…

[this is all 720p; higher resolutions (especially 2160p) create files with silly sizes that just aren’t feasible to upload]

Hmm, you’re not using iOS are you? Didn’t Apple recently introduce a default data limit of around 150MB on mobile connections?

Hmm, you’re not using iOS are you? Didn’t Apple recently introduce a default data limit of around 150MB on mobile connections?

Close – I am using macOS Big Sur. I was surprised by the message and reject of upload but did not follow it up at the time. It looks as if it is worth investigating.

I just watched the video – so thank you to John for making it freely available. It was really interesting to see an experienced PCB designer demonstrate and share his expertise in this field using his own custom PCB software on RISC OS. In addition, his demonstration of the commercial use of RISC OS was very good to see too. I never knew RISC OS was used to handle emergency calls in certain fields.

Thanks to John and of course Terry.

Thanks for the feedback.

When your talking about something as exciting as making PCBs :-) It’s very difficult to decide how much detail to go into before your audiences eyes start to glaze over and they fall off their chairs.

I’m glad you found at least some of the content useful.

Very interesting – will see if I can download this video.

How do you copy a old board?

It would be nice if your Prog could load a background sprite – of a old board – perhaps some size adjustment – so a new board could be copied over the top.

Many thanks for your contribution :-)

You can’t easily copy an old board.

you could copy a single sided board but to copy a double sided board you would need it to be unpopulated as the components would get in the way and you would not be able to see the track connections. Also many simple boards these days use inner layers for power connections, one layer for 0v and one layer for power 5v & 12v etc. you can never see these layers they are hidden ?.

Ah. Until the post just before this one, I’d been wondering where we were going here, having designed boards professionally in the late 70s and early 80s. Terry speaks truth!

It would be very nice if you were able to import Gerber files to RiscPCB.

This has been on my to do list for ages. It is a massive task.

Gerber has changed greatly since the very start of writing which was very early in the days of the RS274D Gerber format we now have RS274-X.

Originally Gerber was very simple indeed just apertures and draw commands now you get commands for filled areas which RiscPCB uses to create ground planes and many graphical shapes.

A good gerber input would have to support the whole spec and RiscPCB as it stands now does not even support the drawing of defined circles you can only use tracks or pads, to support a gerber input would be a massive task as RiscPCB would have to support all RS274 commands, not that it’s impossible but the whole program would need updating.

If I get to update the C code to a level approaching something sensible then I will keep in mind expansion for these type of things as I said in the video RiscPCB was my first C program that was never supposed to be finished it was a learning program that just kept getting bigger.