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The Itinerant Engineer

CP: The Board

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My first circuit board, sent off to BatchPCB for fabrication today! Thanks again to BatchPCB and Sparkfun for the very helpful writeups on producting PCBs, and thanks to Cadsoft for producing Eagle for PCB layout. Also, props to Instructables user westfw for the great instructable entitled, “Turn your EAGLE schematic into a PCB”.
First cut of CP Printed Circuit board

Written by dra

February 10th, 2010 at 5:34 pm

Posted in Uncategorized

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  • Jon

    Enjoyed your presentation at Ignite tonight. Your board design looks great. I recently ordered a batch of boards from another source which came in at $3 each for a 2″ x 3.25″ board. Your board looks a bit smaller, so the cost per board would be even less. Please email me and I’ll share the details.

    Jon

  • David

    The price I quoted (2.50/sqin) was for unit quantity, double-sided board with two-sided silkscreen and 8/8 tolerance. My board was about 3.5sqin. Where’d you get yours?

  • Jon

    I ordered them from PCBgeek.com. They are located in China with a US rep. I’ve ordered two boards from them and been happy with the results.

    Their service is for 2-sided boards with solder mask on both sides and silkscreen on one or both sides. They make as many boards as will fit in 200 square inches for $89 including shipping. For the 2″ x 3.25″ boards, I received 30 boards. It’s always a bit of a surprise on the number of boards that I’ll receive since I don’t know what their panel size is.

    It’s taken about a week to complete the board, with a week – week-and-a-half for shipping.

  • Jon

    Here’s a link to the last board I had made there. It’s sort of the opposite philosophy than your board. It’s designed to be a general purpose 28-pin PIC board with connectors for UART, I2C/SPI, analog in and PWM outputs. I designed it to be essentially “throw away” in that one could be dedicated to a project without being too concerned about getting it back. There are minimum features on the board to keep the cost down. If additional parts are needed, a daughter board with access to all the port pins can be added.

    http://digital-diy.com/projects/151-tap-28-a-throw-away-pic-board-for-quick-and-dirty-applications.html

  • David

    Thanks for the tip, 200 sqin of fab for $89 is a pretty phenomenal deal. When I need to get a few more of these produced, I’ll definitely check it out.

    One question: your TAP design is for a through-hole part. If you’re going to make a large-scale board that can’t be rearranged (think breadboard vs. PCB), why not just bite the bullet and go straight to SMT?

  • Jon

    When I designed the board, I had my own interests in mind as well as the interests of the PIC community. I’ve released the board to the public under a Creative Commons license, so anybody is free to use the design. To make the board accessible to the greatest number of people, a through-hole part seemed like the best way to go.

    The board will handle most 28-pin PIC parts, of which there are many in different configurations. The user can use a part that’s on hand or make a selection to suit the project.

    If I was having the boards assembled, I probably would go to SMT. I can do a passable job with SMT chips, but the snack of 804 resistors and capacitors I bought kind of scares me!

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