So I finally finished my first real layout, a flight computer for a hobby rocket built around an STM32F405. The power switching and the e-match terminal are going on a seperate board, and telemetry lives on its own little module too. The two boards just talk over the serial pins of a small wifi module, so the main board itself is pretty simple, which is prolly the only reason I got this far.
My worry is the routing around the main chip. I kept a lot of the traces on the top layer running under the body of the chip to reach the pins on the far side, and there is a exposed pad in the middle that I tied to ground with a handful of small vias. Is that normal practice or am I asking for trouble? It looked tidy on screen but now I keep second guessing it.
The other thing bugging me is my decoupling caps. Some of them ended up a bit farther from the power pins than I wanted because of a connector that was in the way. shoud I redo the placement and shuffle things around, or is close-ish good enough for something that only flies for a couple minutes? If anyone has done a first board like this and lived to tell about it, I'd love to hear what you checked before hitting order. I have limited money for revisions here so I want to catch the dumb stuff now.