PCB Driveby

Comparison of prototyping technics. Designing a board

Making a board

output file generation
online fabricators DIY

Breadboard Fast, susceptible to vibration, dropping. Can document with good photo. easy to debug.

Protoboard Cheap, slower than breadboard, hard to capture layout, good reliability. Thought required while assembling.

Circuit Board mroe startup cost/time, Good debugging, easy to make more boards, good reliability, good for communicating design, smallest.

Schematic Capture add parts, connect parts, create new parts.

You have a control panel, in the control panel you have to enable all of the library as use them all, and then go back to schematics and then it will show up the list. When you click on the names it will show up the details. Now what we want to do is to add avr chip. There is a page on the eagle site where you can search for stuff you don’t have in the library.

You can also in the search box search for mega.

We have different package types, we can turn off the surface mount click, smds turn it off. It will only search for not surface mount ones. You can then place it on the canvas and then press esc or press stop.

Go back to add search for vcc and then supply1 symbol, you can drop that in. You can scroll down and then you can find grn. You put the power up and ground to the bottom.

you can click on the move and move stuff around. You should find the icon for the net, and then you want to use it. We then click net then click on the side of the vcc then we click on the pin on the avr and they connect.

eyeball icon shows you the name of the net. vcc.

Let’s find a LED and connect it to our circuit.
Resistors are in RCL library. You want an american type one instead of european.

Then we put all on the canvas. Another useful library called pinhead. You have connectors in this library.

In the file menu if you switch to board.

In the boar, you don’t want to crossing. We do have two layers for the board, top and bottom. SElect top you can see there there is number of different shapes, everytime the trace occurs it will do a right angle. Try to avoid right angle. Yellow wire goes to red. You do connect them wire by wire. Try to put ground on the bottom of the board. Use thge bottom make a square you can turn on the grid on and turn on spacing, you just put a rectangle for the bottom, put a copper and then press on it and connect it to the ground. The reason we have a ground in the bottom is keeps the routing easy.

He usually use 0,01, if you are running more current you need a wider wire like 0.032.
Make the power priority, auto route doesn’t care about those. in the board mode if you go like ripup in the command line then you will get your traces back. rip off all your signals.

In order to get the right package sizes you can just print out and see if it fits and the rest of the components you can look at from the datasheet.

Batch PCB

$10 + $2.50/sq in (cheapest for small boards)
wait while orders are batched

GoldPhoenix PCB

$120 for 14.5 x 10” panel
shipping included. (~1 week) Custom PCB
2x4x5.5” for 58
$12 shipping. Advanced Circuits

You cannot send the eagle files you need to export it to another format. Sparkfun has this file and Nick has modified it, http://jamesnsearc.com/code/SFE-Special.cam
You need put this in the CAM folder in the eagle application. There is a bluish icon and there is a cam icon and then you need to open a cam and then open the SFE-Special file. It gives couple of mappings annd what we need to do is process job.

Eagle also do the designer checking. You can upload the zipped file of the folder you exported.

Build your own circuit board - Al Williams