Building circuits

I've decided that constructing whole circuits on Veroboard or blob board is too much of a PITA for me to do with regularity, even for one-offs. I like soldering things together, but even fairly straightforward projects consisting of a couple op amps take way too much time to put together when it's going to be for something that needs to actually be used. It kills my enthusiasm for the project.

I think I'm going to brush up on my KiCAD skills and just have PCBs made from now on, even for "trivial" stuff.

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Reply to
bitrex
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I can throw together a reasonably simple circuit in an hour or so, which is easier than a PCB and gives instant satisfaction. And gets me away from the computer for a while.

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But sometimes things are more complex, so we pool a bunch of requests from the gang and do a 4-layer board

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which we can shear up and hand out to different people.

Hey, somebody here could do that for the group.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

Somebody already does. It is called OSHPark.

Reply to
Chris Jones

I meant that someone could collect schematics from different people, lay out a tiled board, order some, shear them up, and mail to the various people. There are interesting variations.

SED creates all sorts of ideas that could engage interested people; there just aren't enough interested people.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

ordering pcbs and having them shipped to various places would be easy, the question is are you willing to pay a worth it amount for the time neede d to make symbols and footprint for any special parts you need, draw up the s chematic, figure out and do layout etc.

-Lasse

Reply to
Lasse Langwadt Christensen

That is exactly what OSHPark does, except for the layout part, they don't do that. It is pretty much how it started actually. You can make your design "shared" on the OSHPark site, so that it can get mailed to multiple people without you having to collect addresses, buy envelopes, pay all of the postage etc. - but they each have to pay for their 3 copies of the boards themselves. Yes, someone has to do the layout, there is no getting around that. If you did want to get multiple designs made then submitting them to OSHPark when each is ready seems better to me than someone here risking a couple of hundred bucks on a panel that they have to somehow get back from this shady bunch of characters, and then spending a fun day at the post office with customs forms. Also good luck getting everyone here to "finish" their designs in the same month so you can send it off. OSHPark sends off several panels most days. The times when I would not use OSHPark is when I want a large board done cheaply, or a lot of identical large boards, or when I need it very fast.

One shortcoming of the shared boards on OSHPark is that they do not force people to submit any link to documentation or even schematic or BOM, so you sometimes people don't, and you end up with nothing more than a pretty pattern that you'd have to guess the function of.

Reply to
Chris Jones

You're kidding, right? This place is full of tightwads. There's not two cents in the idea. ;-)

Tim

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Seven Transistor Labs, LLC 
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Reply to
Tim Williams

oh. right.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

But seriously, if people don't have time and want to offload such things, I could do it for a modest rate. Little two sided example boards are easy.

Tim

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Reply to
Tim Williams

Serious circuits should be 4-layer, especially if one board is to make up a bunch of assorted experiments for different people.

I just hired a new PCB layout guy, and his references say he's fast, so I hope I won't be bottlenecked in layout. I also hope I won't have trouble keeping him busy!

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

Do not worry about keeping him busy. If he does have any spare time, encourage him to learn about other things you do. If he is fast, you want to keep him and you do not want him to worry about being laid off.

Dan

Reply to
dcaster

At a local firm I do layout for, they've tried contract-to-hiring several layouters over the time I've seen. None of them were very good or stuck around very long.

From what I've seen, I'm about three times faster than the average designer. That's a value that's hard to compete with.

I'd offer my services, but you'd probably want the output back in house format (PADS) -- Altium can import such things with reasonable success, but going the other direction may not be so expedient or accurate. I suppose I could send you a .PcbDoc, and you can see how well it looks, if you're interested.

Tim

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Seven Transistor Labs, LLC 
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Reply to
Tim Williams

So am I, but I have other things to do. I think the person who designed the circuit has an automatic advantage over someone else.

Layout is like programming: some people are 5x, 10x faster than others.

I don't like outside contractors for layout. It's so much better to be physically close to the person doing the layout, to track progress often.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

This guy is interesting because he's a tech too. Lots of layout people, even good ones, know basically nothing about electricity.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

I have bought PC boards from Itead in china. It costs about 20$. But I have done the CAD work my self.

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Reply to
leif.michaelsson

The problem with a non-technical layout person is in the corners. Layout often matters and, while a non-technical person can learn hard and fast rules, they often miss details that a more technical person would do naturally. I think all of our (employee) layout guys are engineers and from what I've been told, two have their MSEE.

Reply to
krw

You have graduate engineers laying out boards? I don't think I have ever seen that before.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  
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Reply to
John Larkin

Yep. They're not kids just out of school, either. They've been with the company upwards of fifteen years.

Reply to
krw

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encourage him to learn about other things you do. If he is fast, you want to keep him and you do not want him to worry about being laid off.

Depends on the boards. With modern layout software and tricky boards, it ma y be quicker to have the engineer lay out the board than to have them tell a layout person how the board needs to be laid out, then do the detail chec k on the layout to make sure that all the signals have been laid out right.

At Cambridge Instruments we had one famous disaster where a board that had been laid out with transmission line over ground planes got the inner layer s scrambled because the printed circuit manufacturer was worried that board might warp - when they finally built it right it didn't - and one more min or disaster where a critical signal that should have been routed as a trans mission line wasn't and ended up late at it's destination, with a very slow transition time.

We had to fix it by routing it through sub-minature coax. Engineers can cre ate that kind of drop-off on their own, but transferring information to a l ayout person adds opportunities to add more.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

But you should have the option of doing it discreetly. Some of those boards might have commercial potential.

Reply to
Tom Del Rosso

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