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Board design
One of the major goals with the board design was to get it right first time. Because we were going to get high quality boards made having to have a second run would be very expensive. Towards this goal we decided to design a single board that would be able to perform all tasks required for the different boards.
The one area were we decided to move off the main PCB was the motor driver. This was mainly because the motor driver circuitry was sufficiently complex that we believed the overhead of a second board design would be outweighed by the reduced routing complexity on the main board.
To make the development of the hardware much easier, it was decided to make the PCBs 4 layered. This meant that the cost was a little higher, but saved time. In the end the PCBs had no problems with decoupling, crosstalk or common path noise.
To allow the PCBs to be fitted in a plastic box, only small components were placed on the reverse side of the PCBs. This worked well, also keeping the trace length of decoupling capacitors short.