Reverse Engineering the Briot Tracer: Hardware II

In the post Reverse Engineering the Briot Tracer: Hardware I promised to post a hierarchical schematic of the Briot Tracer. The time has come.

You can find in this post the complete hierarchical schematic in PDF as well as the Kicad project, have fun!.

I want to express once again, that I did some of this as part of the work that was done during the repair of a Briot Tracer. Once repaired I felt I could help others by completing the schematic and sharing it.

The complete schematic is 21 pages long and is divided into individual schematic sheets by function, as an example each group of limit switches and their associated circuit has its own sheet in the schematic. However, this is not always possible.

For example a single IC drives the Z and Translation motors, while another one drives the Pinch and Frame motors. This does not allow to create a single schematic sheet with all the circuitry associated for example to the Frame, in which the switches and their associated circuitry and the motor driver are located.

To do this one would have to split the motor driver into two units "A" and "B" (as is done with 74HCxx ICs), but I prefer to keep the ICs as units whenever possible.

Kicad's hierarchical schematics are a very powerful tool that allows you to create extremely complex and large schematics in an orderly fashion, if it is used correctly, which facilitates the management of the schematic in general. For small schematics it is not worth the effort and most of the time it complicates the reading or analysis of the whole circuit.

April 27, 2021: Updated the schematic to revision 1.1
December 17, 2021: Updated the schematic to revision 1.2

Briot Tracer Complete PDF Circuit Schematic (Rev. 1.2) - Hierarchical

In this case a hierarchical schematic is essential, since the complete single-sheet schematic required an A1 page, which is not convenient if you need to have it on paper. (If you want to compare them, look at the previous post, where you can find the one-page schematic).

Download the hierarchical Briot tracer circuit schematic in PDF (Rev. 1.2)

Download the Kicad project that contains the Briot tracer, complete hierarchical circuit schematic (Rev. 1.2)

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