this'll be fun...

Other Hardware Displays
1

So I'm making a new LED matrix board for the newest version of a synth/sequencer I've been working on for a while.

I designed one a couple years ago in Eagle that I got fabbed by batchPCB. It was okay, there were some silly design errors and general newbie layout and design (all auto-routed).

I re-made the schematic, making sure there were no errors, and making some little improvements here and there, and just for the heck of it, I decided I'll hand-wire it this time...

Here's the schematic. The 5 shift registers that control the display are all daisy-chained, so only 3 wires (data, clock, latch) are needed to control the entire display.

a schematic by beefinator, on Flickr

And here's the board I designed. Yes, I used Eagle again, but this time it was all manually laid out and routed.
I designed it so that I could wire up everything on the back of the board with uninsulated solid wire; the red traces in the design would be higher above the board than the blue traces, or vice versa.

circuit layout by beefinator, on Flickr

The 6-pin header (ICSP pinout, just an arbitrary choice to have a uniform system to connect the individual boards within the synth's enclosure) and the caps are not laid out and connected yet, but that's trivial. E.g. the 0.1uf caps cam probably just be soldered wherever they fit on the back of the board across the Vcc and Gnd pins of the 595's.

I imagine this board will look pretty cool when it's done...

[sarcasm]But this is certainly going to be fun wiring it all up...[/sarcasm]

2

Can't tell what you have for parts, its too small.
Can you make the schematic parts closer together, less long wiring runs, so the parts appear larger?

3

Also, if you wire it all using wirewrap, will be easy to assemble.
Don't forget decoupling caps (100nF/0.1uF) across Vcc/Gnd at each IC.

4

Eagle should have an unique wire symbol it looked like a thick wire and was called a bus that is actually a way of graphically representing net list connectivity to simplify regular schematic drawings such as yours all the leads had either machine or man generated names that were applied to the required nets but the "Special Wire" or bus symbol should be used in your drawing as it can easily represent direction so as to make work on it later easier and to replace that mass of spaghetti decorating your drawing... and one or two other points... Place the pads for the caps as a MUST DO and use a ground plane even if It's only on the edges of the board. It's not much more work but I think your efforts will be worthwhile. IMO

Doc