Panelizing PCBs In Eagle

February 22, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 37 Comments

final_panel

A lot of the board houses out there including Seeed and ITead studios have a fixed size for circuit boards before the price goes up. A one-inch square board costs the same as a much larger 5cm x 5cm board, making panelized PCBs a great way to get more boards for the same amount of money. Trying to panelize a board in Eagle with copy and paste is a chore without the right tools, though, so we’re happy to see a great panelization tutorial from [Victor].

To panelize one of his boards for a PCB order, [Victor] used one of Eagle’s User Language Programs to duplicate the part names on the additional boards. After that, it was a simple matter of running a CAM job to generate the necessary Gerber files.

Of course once the boards arrive, you’ll have to cut them apart from each other. This can be done with everything from a Dremel to a hack saw to a metal shear, but we’re wondering what other Hackaday readers are using to cut up PCBs. Leave a note in the comments with your preferred method of depanelization.

Making Eagle Work With Circuits.io

February 21, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 25 Comments

Ever so slowly, we’re inching towards a world of Internet-based electronic design tools. The state of these tools, including Upverter and other cloud-based solutions, hasn’t been all that great until now; with any new piece of schematic capture and PCB layout software, the libraries will be woefully inadequate in the beginning. This is about to change, because circuits.io is now allowing Eagle libraries to be imported.

As you may well be aware, Eagle is the de facto standard for homebrew and hobbyist schematic capture and board layout software. Even though Eagle isn’t open source and is limited to rather small PCBs with the free version, somehow Eagle has retained its popularity, most likely due to the huge number of component libraries available.

By allowing users and designers to import Eagle libraries, the folks at circuits.io are capitalizing on a huge amount of work done by designers and engineers over the years in creating custom Eagle parts for just about every component imaginable. It’s a great accomplishment for the circuits.io team and a boon for anyone wanting to move their PCB design tools over to the cloud.

The Perils Of Buying A Stereo Microscope Without A Stand

February 20, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 47 Comments

scope

[Steve] has wanted a stereo microscope in his lab for years now. Since his eyesight is becoming progressively worse, he figured it was time to look around on ebay and see what he could dig up. He ended up buying a very cheap microscope without a stand, figuring he could build one rather easily. Well, the articulated stand was rather easy to put together, but it did take a whole lot of time to build.

The main goal of [Steve]’s project was to have his microscope at the end of an articulated arm. With this setup, he could easily tuck the ‘scope against the back of his workbench when not in use and easily bring it out when necessary. This meant building a custom arm, though, and in the building process [Steve] used just about every machine tool he had at his disposal.

The end result is a fully articulated arm that can be moved to just about any point on his workbench and adjusted up and down for those really weird project. [Steve] says this may be a great introduction to home powder coating, and he really should build a small LED light source, but we’re loving the project so far.

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Rusty Old Table Saw Turned Into A Workstation Worthy Of A Master Craftsman

February 19, 2013 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

rusty-old-table-saw-turned-pro-workstation

Okay, first of all: holy crap! Even if you didn’t know this started as a rusty table saw, the workstation that came out of this project is just phenomenal. It really makes us wish we had looked around for a used model with a cast iron top instead of going for the cheap stamped metal one that was ready to use.

[Simon Leblanc] started with a Delta contractor’s saw that was rusty inside and out. The refurbishment began by removing the table and everything from the inside. The rods and gears were all cleaned up before he began to sand away the rust on the table itself. But obviously he didn’t stop with getting the saw to be functional again. He built a small set of cabinets to serve as the base for the saw. They went inside of this larger assembly that combines an MDF table top with an Accusquare rip fence to greatly increase the working surface of the tool.

Now he needs to start in on an extra fancy CNC jig for the thing.

[via Reddit]

Via Press Crushes Copper To Make A Mechanical Connection

February 19, 2013 by Mike Szczys 22 Comments

via-press-in-action

[Jay] was looking for a way to make his own vias on homemade double-sided PCBs when he stumbled across this post from about five years ago. The technique shown here makes mechanical vias and was developed by [Retromaster]. There’s no soldering involved, instead he uses some solid core copper wire and a press to crush it tightly against the board.

The press is made from aluminum stock, with a couple of plates of stainless steel which come in contact with the board. The aluminum stock is easy to work with, but it’s relatively soft which is the reason for the addition of steel. He uses copper wire which already fits tightly in the hole through the substrate. After clipping off the excess as near to the board as possible a trip through the press leaves each side flat as shown in the inset image.

We looked through some of the other projects we’ve seen from [Retromaster] like the Atari 2600 in an FPGA and this emulated Amiga floppy drive. But we didn’t see any diy boards where he used this crushing technique.

555-timer Charges Lead Acid Batteries

February 14, 2013 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

555-timer-charges-lead-acid-batteries

[Kenneth Finnegan] took the focus of a great design and redirected it to solve his own problem. What results is this lead acid battery charger based on the 555 timer. It’s not a top-of-the-line, all the bells and whistles type of charger. But it gets the job done with a readily available IC and no need to code for a microcontroller.

The original idea came from a solar battery charger entered in the 555 timer contest. The main difference in application between that and [Kenneth’s] application is the source. A solar array or wind turbine is limited on how much juice it can produce. But mains power can push a shocking (har-har) amount of current if you’re not paying attention. Herein lies the alterations to the circuit design. To control this he’s using a Laptop power supply as an intermediary and only implementing the constant current portion of the tradition 3-stage lead acid charging profile (those stages are explained in his write up).

He did a talk on the charger at his local radio club. You can see the 90-minute video after the break.

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Toroid Winding Cheat

February 13, 2013 by Mike Szczys 68 Comments

When you need a toroid the easiest source is often to wind it yourself. The problem being that placing a few hundred windings around a ferrite ring is a real drag, especially if you have to make several of them. This cheat developed by [Jim W.] will save a lot of time. He cuts the ring in half for the winding and reassembles it afterward.

Here you can see that he has half of the core mounted in a drill chuck. To get to this point he scored the ferrite before clamping half in a vice and whacking the extruding half with a block of wood and a hammer. He hasn’t found a perfect solution for scoring the material (a utility knife or a triangular file both work but have drawbacks). Leave a comment if you’ve got any bright ideas.

Once the core is in two pieces he used some copper pipe with one end flattened and bent to the shape of the ring segment. With it hot glued in place he takes it for a spin (shown in the clip after the break). Once the windings are done a bit of super glue recombines the halves. This sort of thing is great for monitoring power use.

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