Creating PC boards

On Wed, 22 Sep 2004 03:49:04 GMT in sci.electronics.basics, "anonymous" wrote,

For single-sided boards I enthusiastically recommend the toner transfer system as described by Tom Gootee at

Follow his instructions closely.

TY! Thats a great site.

Actually there is a Yahoo group that discusses all of this called Homebrew PCBs at:

Michael

For simple boards you can use the hand-draw method.

Bob Masta dqatechATdaqartaDOTcom D A Q A R T A Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis

the

PCBs at:

Yes. That is an excellent PCB-making discussion-group.

Tom Gootee

On 28 Sep 2004 00:42:32 -0700 in sci.electronics.basics, snipped-for-privacy@fullnet.com (Thomas P. Gootee) wrote,

PCBs at:

To hell with all yahoo groups. Please keep the discussion public and accessible on usenet.

PCBs at:

David,

Your point is a VERY, very (very!) good one.

Probably the MOST-valuable information resource that I've EVER

*FOUND*, by far, is the Usenet newsgroups' SEARCHABLE ARCHIVE, now located at (formerly at formerly known as which basically has ALL traffic from ALL groups, from all the way back to the beginning of the Usenet (around 1980?) (Although I'm not sure if they have any archived traffic from the ARPANet, which I *THINK* was probably Usenet's predecessor, before DARPANet (defense-related) was split off from ARPANet [IIRC: "ARPA" stands for "Advanced Research Projects Agency"], which we had through our "early" Unix systems, using uucp, in the EE building when I was at Purdue in the mid-to-late 1970s.)

It does cause me some fairly-grave "concern", when there is a lot of excellent, important information being discussed, in a group that's somewhere else, on line, that's then NOT going to be a part of the searchable newsgroups archive.

There was a discussion, in the Homebrew_PCBs group, about that VERY same concern, not too long ago. I don't remember seeing any good conclusion to it. But I kind-of *suspect* that since Yahoogroups is driven by advertising, there might even be some objection, on Yahoo's part, to, for example, re-posting all of the message traffic, from one of their groups, in a Usenet newsgroup [which I would like to see done JUST so it would be available during searches of the newsgroups archive. If I recall correctly, the yahoogroups message archives don't even show up in WEB searches, either. What a WASTE!].

That was just a guess, though. I haven't bothered to "read the fine print", yet. BUT, if there ISN'T any legally-binding-type of reason NOT to do it, it seems like it would be a worthwhile project. However, another problem with yahoogroups is that it seems like there's also no good way to "dump" the entire archive of one of their groups. Even searches of a group's message-archive, there, return results from only a small range of message-numbers, at a time (making their archive-searching practically USELESS, at least when compared to

So, even if it were "allowed", it would probably be pretty tedious, if one wanted to try to re-post all of the archived messages to Usenet, from even one heavily-used Yahoo group. Automating the process, somehow, might make that problem "go away", though. Otherwise, dividing the task among lots of people, each one downloading and re-posting to Usenet just a small segment of the message archive of a yahoo group, MIGHT be a more-feasible alternative.

ON the other hand, for the Homebrew_PCBs yahoo group, for example, I receive the "digests" of all of the message traffic, via email. And I have saved them ALL (so I can much-more-easily search them, from within MS Exchange). Unfortunately, I joined that group only relatively recently. BUT, if there were someone who joined when the group was NEW, who also has saved all of the digests, then BINGO, the messages would all be readily available for re-posting. (Or, maybe a group's OWNER has a much better way to do it...)

Oh well. It's something to think about, I guess. But, even though you are quite right, I, myself, wouldn't, as a practical matter, forego being a member of some of the yahoo groups that I belong to, not just for THAT reason, anyway, because: they are simply too important to me. (Another GREAT one, to me, for example, is the TekScopes group.)

So, what to do? I'll try find time to check into whether it is possible/legal/etc to re-post their messages, either to Usenet or, failing that, to a website. I think I'll also see if I can get anywhere, in trying to contact someone there, to at least try to find out why their groups' message-traffic isn't even available in web-search results. I realize that yahoo and google (and the other search-engine companies) might be "arch-rivals", or something like that. But it SEEMS like they would welcome more hits/traffic, no matter where it came from, etc etc. (But I really just have NO idea...)

Hmmm... I *DO* have a friend from high school who was one of the original founders of Yahoo, or at least was THERE, in a fairly high-level position, back when they started (I never got the exact details about his original position, there. But I do remember that he sold out, for at least tens of millions, just before the big tech crash, a few years back, hehe. He was at our 25-year H.S. reunion, in

2000.). So maybe I could contact him and at least get a quick rundown of "why or why not" (something could be done about it), etc, and maybe even a good internal contact, there. Worth a quick attempt, at least, I suppose. But I guess I wouldn't hold my breath...

Or, hehe, we could all try to convince everyone to use the Usenet newsgroups, instead. Just kidding. THAT seems like a MUCH-more-difficult proposition. There's also the fact that a yahoo group can be started by anyone, almost instantly (for free), which seems to be at least one fairly-major "advantage" that they have, over the Usenet newsgroups. The group-owner can also then set operational parameters for their group, such as whether it's public or private, etc. Anyway: It just doesn't seem like they're going to "go away", any time soon. So I hope that SOMEONE can come up with a more-general way to make their information-content available for at least SOME more-public type of searching, at least for the content of the NON-private groups.

SOrry to have created such a large post, about what some might consider a trivial issue. But, having seen the **incredible** value, and sheer "POWER", that has resulted from the creation of the searchable archive of the Usenet traffic, it does NOT seem unimportant, at ALL, to ME.

Anybody else?

Regards,

Tom Gootee

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[snip...snip...]

Heartily concur; good post. (Although I'll admit that I was *so* tempted to quote the entire article and then stick a "Me too!" at the end. ;-)

--
Rich Webb   Norfolk, VA

I've found many of the posts from my Yahoo group through a Google search. So the messages do show up. Everyone has their favorite way. You can find as many that swear by news groups. Most just swear at Yahoo. lol But I post to both to help both arenas and reach more people.

Michael

Homebrew PCBs at:

Hey, expresspcb is great. Free software and getting a few first trys out is relatively cheap. Usually the others either get you on the software or get you on the onesie twosie stuff.

Michael