SparkFun has posted an excellent guide to the many different issues you could run into when you finally decide to get a circuit board professionally produced. We assume that most of you aren’t running a professional design firm and will appreciate these tips gleaned from years of experience. They provided a rule list, Eagle DRC, and CAM file to help you get it right the first time. The end goal is designing a board that won’t be prone to manufacturing errors. The tutorial starts by covering trace width and spacing. They recommend avoiding anything less than 10mil traces with 10mil spacing. For planes, they increase the isolation to 12mil to avoid the planes pouring onto a trace. They also talk about annular rings, tenting, labeling, and generating the appropriate gerber and drill files. SparkFun isn’t completely infallible though, and manages to produce a coaster from time to time.

SparkFun naturally followed up this strict tutorial with a guide to unorthodox header hole placement. If you want to learn more about Eagle, have a look at [Ian]‘s overview of Eagle 5 and Ruin & Wesen’s layout videos.