The 33 each deal is a much better buy if you meet the requirements. I had good results from e-teknet.com also, somewhat cheaper than AC's prices. Downside is that the boards are batched up and made in China and hence delivery time is slower (much slower) and you don't have the same process visibility that AC gives you (AC tells you exactly what stage the boards are at right up to the time of shipment, and you get the track# from the factory direct to your door).
You wind up paying more or less $100 for a minimum order of prototypes regardless of where you buy; the difference lies in what you get for that money :)
This guy uses picture paper from Staples, muriatic acid from Home Depot,hydrogen peroxide from the drug store and claims to be able to do very narrow traces quite easily.
No it doesn't. The design and assembly are all you. I don't machine my own brake rotors, I send them to a shop. Doesn't detract from the status of the car as a hobby project.
I am interested in designing and making small printed circuit boards for my learning and hobby projects. I was wanting to get opinions a to what would be the best way to make printed circuit boards that actually looked like printed circuit board,s but without all the etching chemicals (doing this in my house and have low tolerance to chemical smells) and photo equipment need for applying the resist (a.k.a Cheap Bastard)
The cheaper the better, but I am still looking for a descent looking board.
I would also like some opinions on a Radio Shack item I saw on their website. It is the Craig Circuit Pen. Is it any good for design work or is it just mainly for small repairs? Is it any good in repairing board traces?
Any opinions would be appreciated. I know in advance what I ask will not result in an extremely good quality board, but I would like to start small and work my way up to the more expensive stuff later.
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Hell yeah. my middle name is "cheap ass" so I should know :)
If you are going to buy the toner transfer paper ... I would recommend the blue press-n-peel variety from
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Its cheaper to buy the 20 for $30 than the 5 for $10 at electronic stores.
I buy elec components from ebay and occasionally from allelectronicscorp but I have yet to find pcb manufacturing materials (other than permanent marker and copper laminate pcb) on ebay.
Thanks for that. I had forgotten about the toner method. I will research it and refresh my memory on how it is done. I would assume this is cheaper do than the photo process (correct me if I am wrong)
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Thanks. Things are never a simple as one thinks they are otherwise everyone would be doing it (I heard that soemwhere before). But it sure fits when it comes to anything electronic whether it be design or repair.
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Having just been through this myself (but with the messy chemicals, which don't bother me) I have some thoughts:
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has a lot of stuff for the toner-transfer method. I've got their paper, but I'm thinking about buying their starter kit ($100 at digikey) to get the laminator, foil, and thinner boards. Using an iron and 2oz boards resulted in a poor quality (yet functional) board. Still uses the messy chemicals, and you don't get plated through holes.
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makes a set of tools that let you mechanically etch boards (CNC router) and laminate them together to make multilayer boards. Kinda expensive for a home hobby though, but you do get 4 layer boards this way.
If you don't need mask or silk,
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has a "bare bones" special that's pretty reasonable ($44+0.50/in2) for one-off boards. If you want a couple, their $33/3 gives you mask and silk too. There are more and more companies doing cheap prototype fabs these days, and you *do* get plated through holes.
If you are working with leaded components, you can make perfectly respectable-looking circuits on matrix board. The trick is to wire the board with solid - not stranded wire - so you can bend the wires to fit tidily around the integrated circuits, and - once you have got the bulk of the wiring in place - to tie the wires to the board by threading heavy thread or fishing line though convenient holes in the board, so that the wire bundles stay where you put them.
If you use enamelled transformer wire to make the connections you can route quite a few wires through the 0.1" (2.54mm) gap between the individual holes in the matrix board.
If you buy good quality matrix board, with a "collander" ground plane over one side of the board (Farnell certrainly used to stock it) this can work up to quite high frequencies (well into the MHz region). I've hacked surface mount components onto this sort of board by carving up the circular copper pads on the other side of such a board to provide lands to which I could solder some of the SMD leads.
When I first started in electronics, this was the regular way to built prototye circuits and one-off systems. We had "wiremen" whose full-time job was building such boards. An 8"x 8" board (roughly equivalent to a double Eurocard today) would take a couple of weeks, and always included a few mistakes which you had to find and fix.
Good wiremen often found your mistakes on the circuit diagram, and sometimes corrected them without telling you, which was another kind of problem.
A Cambridge Instruments prototype stroboscopic voltage sensing electron microscope worked for some years at Thompson-EFCIS at Grenoble with a bunch of hand wired matrix boards that I'd designed and - in part - rewired.
For fast circuits or critical layouts, this didn't produce real prototypes, and we'd have to get a printed circuit layout done with black tape on mylar film, then manually edit the first layout to sort out the teething troubles.
The stroboscopic part of the Thompson-EFCIS machine used 100k ECL and
5GHz wide-band transistors, and that was on printed circuit board from the start. The second version could get the electron beam pulse width down to 800psec using a hand-tweaked Percival distributed amplifier built with BFR96 transistors. The production version - I installed the first one at Siemens (now Infineon) at Munich in 1984 - got down to
500psec, but that used a single long-tailed pair of microwave power transistors. Much more expensive, but simpler and faster.
True, unless your project requires plated through holes, such as vias under parts (BGAs) or occluded pins (such as under terminal blocks where you can't solder them). Or ground planes. Or mask (narrow pitch SMD).
Of course, I did mention that I was thinking about getting more home-brew equipment myself :-)
I have tried it. (My traces weren't especially narrow.) I used some clay-covered paper that had a mailer ad on 1 side. (I was trying for CHEAP.) It took a fair amount of patience and time to remove the semi-solid pulp that resulted after soaking the paper. (I used a semi-stiff acid brush.) Required a bit of touch-up before etching.
If you're only making one, then the simplest, cheapest, fastest way is probably to use a protoboard
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and many others) and point-to-point wire where necessary. It will NOT look pretty but gives good results for one-off projects.
I usually go for the "three holes per pad plus power/ground buss" variety, some folks prefer "one hole per pad" and others prefer stripboard (probably TM somebody and not AFAIK available retail on this side of the pond).
If you're doing a run of (pick your threshold of pain) then a board house is really the only way to go. There are some that are quite inexpensive for two sides/no mask/no silkscreen and others that are not really that unreasonable for "real" professional boards.
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is generally well thought of around these parts. Pick up a copy of Nuts & Volts or Circuit Cellar and check the adverts for vendors that cater to small run jobs.
One thing to consider if you're doing a board layout vice the "stick 'm on and wire 'm in" method is ... having to do a board layout. PCB layout packages range in cost from free (GPL) to kilo-$ and all have their own learning curve and time costs.
I would not consider ordering less than three boards for a first-spin prototype.
1 piece to hack about, cut tracks, experiment with different values, solder on probe wires. This board usually becomes pretty flaky by the end of the bring-up session.
After I get the circuit working, 1 piece to build cleanly with all patches applied as neatly as possible and show to the customer (or, if I destroy #1, this board becomes the development prototype).
1 board remains blank so I can buzz out problems.
An accident that fries a board is merely irritating if you can go to a spare, it's enormously costly if you have to pay 1-day turn prices to get another one so you can meet the customer's deadline.
The only thing I don't like about the 33 each price is that if I'm prototyping something 1"x2" I would like to pay less than something
6"x9"; it seems wasteful. For example, I'm making an electronic business card/marketing tool that will be sent to select prospects. It's standard business card size (though thicker), with a LED matrix on one side. I am sending this out to one of the houses that charges for a panel and doesn't care how many subpanels are inside it.
One of the things most people don't learn about prototypes is that they shouldn't try to make them the "final". Expect them to have problems; design them to be fixable. That means making one at a time until you get it right, *then* looking for volume deals.
So, I have a stack of three unusable boards from my 33each purchase, and one bare bones that works. Sigh.
There's a spectrum of sorts... hand-wired, self-etch, and board house. Self-etch can be done quick & dirty, but as you work toward nicer results you'll find yourself using layout software. This leaves you only a small step from using a board house, and getting vastly nicer results / better capability. Then it's a matter of turnaround time.
If you need boards in less than a couple weeks turnaround, you need to look at self-etch, whether you do it yourself or find a cohort who'll do the chemical dirty work for you. Getting started is cheap (USD$35 for a whole kit):
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If you can be patient for the delivery time, moving up to a board house adds a whole lot of capability - solder resist (easier assembly [especially for surface-mount parts], professional-looking results), plated through holes (stronger joints, double-sided boards), silkscreened part numbers. Not to mention being pre-drilled. And the lack of chemical handling & storage.
There are shops that specialize in small one-offs, like SparkFun
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$2.50/sq.in. + $10 s&h) and Olimex
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There are several free layout packages out there. Eagle has a very capable and popular free version
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If you go the self-etch route, I recommend against the toner transfer method because I've had very poor results with it. YMMV. For the incremental cost of photo-resist boards, it's worth printing on transparency and exposing under a room light. (No need for expensive lighting rigs, though you'll need to test exposure times with your lighting source.)
I don't consider 3 pieces "volume". It's about the minimum usable if you're working for an outside client or an internal client at another location. You want minimum two boards populated (one for you and one for them) and working and one to ruin or keep around as blank. If you do field tests, then 5+ is more like it. I find an extra board or two to be a LOT less irritating than having to pay a second set of handling, setup and shipping charges to get one or two additional boards that are essentially identical.
I've ordered 500-1,000 boards without a prototype (including multilayer). Even many hundreds of populated boards without seeing a prototype. If you strive for ZERO defects and develop a comprehensive checklist for projects (beyond just DRC and covering all the errors you've ever made and those you've heard about too) you can get usable boards almost every time, and the reduced time to market will more than pay for the rare problem. The biggies IME are hole sizes and mismatches of schematic pin numbers (or even part pin numbers) to footprint pin numbers, and using a library footprint without fully verifying that it is what you think it is.
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
--
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