Common ground for LED's and switches ?

Design Concepts
1

I’m about to design and etch PCB’s to mount leds and switches to under the frontpanel. It’s kind of a modular pcb with two rows of 4 buttons + LED’s. I want to be able to mount the board in any direction, means 0 degrees or 90 deg. So there are 2 LED’s for each switch (in parallell). You get the point by this picture:

First version:

To ease up the design and reducing jumpers on the board I have connected the LED’s gnd (DOUT) and switches gnd (DIN) together on the PCB. I know this creates a groundloop if I connect the groundpins to both dout and din boards, but should this be a problem ? Or should i just connect it to one ground ?

Maybe I have to split it into two boards, one vertical and one horizontal, to be on the safe side ? ???

What are you’r thoughts about this ?

/Wise

2

Hi,

There’s nothing wrong with boards that have multiple uses, I think.

You’ll need to connect only single ground connection, it should be a common reference point of the circuit, remember.

Looking at your board layout, only two thing bother me, really: Awfully small trace from the CONN1 ground pin to the groundplane and groundplane width just under the PB6.

Bye, Moebius

3

I know the smal traces, it’s just a first draft. By the way the upper two (so as the lower two) pinns of the switch is internaly connected. I’ll try moving the CONN’s around a little to get bigger groundarea to the bottom left switches.

Bye for now

/Wise