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DIY PCBs
Posted by Chris
on
Sunday, April 12, 2009
The blog posts seem to be getting less and less frequent, although this is probably due to stuff actually being done now, and not just written about. Since the arrival of my PIC programmer, no end of ideas have been tried out on the little breadboard/prototyping board. But for one idea, it's time to think about going into production. It doesn't matter whether you're building a robot (cool) or an automated garden-watering system (not so cool, but useful) there comes a time where you need to think about how to put the idea into practice, in a real-world environment. And that means building a PCB.
You can use so-called vero-board (copper strip board) but really this stuff is only one step up from a breadboard prototype and is not really "production quality".
Using the FREE software from Express PCB I put together a schematic, linked it to a PCB and started doodling. After a few hours, I managed to get all my pins connected (the PCB software highlights which pins need joining up as you click on them) with no crossed wires (very important that) and not too many long, snaking traces roaming around the board.
The next step is to get the design off the PC and onto a PCB.
I did think about simply printing the design and tracing over each of the traces in a conductive silver pen (available from Maplin but at a hefty £25). In fact, I even tried out a micro-tipped pen, but the lines it drew were much thicker than I could use, so that idea very quickly got kicked into touch. If you're thinking along similar lines, don't waste your own hard-earned on such a folly: silver pens are for touching up broken contacts (and even then I'm not sure how much use they'd be on a PCB circuit) and are no good for drawing your own layout.
My current method of production (yet to be tested fully but results will be written up here) is the laser-toner-copper-board-etching method as described in many videos on Youtube. I've no idea how the final board will end up, but what I do know already is that my trace layout (above, right) actually looks pretty impressive, whether it works or not!
You can use so-called vero-board (copper strip board) but really this stuff is only one step up from a breadboard prototype and is not really "production quality".
Using the FREE software from Express PCB I put together a schematic, linked it to a PCB and started doodling. After a few hours, I managed to get all my pins connected (the PCB software highlights which pins need joining up as you click on them) with no crossed wires (very important that) and not too many long, snaking traces roaming around the board.
The next step is to get the design off the PC and onto a PCB.
I did think about simply printing the design and tracing over each of the traces in a conductive silver pen (available from Maplin but at a hefty £25). In fact, I even tried out a micro-tipped pen, but the lines it drew were much thicker than I could use, so that idea very quickly got kicked into touch. If you're thinking along similar lines, don't waste your own hard-earned on such a folly: silver pens are for touching up broken contacts (and even then I'm not sure how much use they'd be on a PCB circuit) and are no good for drawing your own layout.
My current method of production (yet to be tested fully but results will be written up here) is the laser-toner-copper-board-etching method as described in many videos on Youtube. I've no idea how the final board will end up, but what I do know already is that my trace layout (above, right) actually looks pretty impressive, whether it works or not!
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