Guide: Why Etch A PCB When You Can Mill?

January 4, 2018 by Adil Malik 83 Comments

I recall the point I started taking electronics seriously, although excited, a sense of dread followed upon the thought of facing the two main obstacles faced by hobbyists and even professionals: Fabricating you own PCB’s and fiddling with the ever decreasing surface mount footprints. Any resistance to the latter proves futile, expensive, and frankly a bit silly in retrospect. Cheap SMD tools have made it extremely easy to store, place, and solder all things SMD.

Once you’ve restricted all your hobbyist designs/experiments to SMD, how do you go about producing the PCBs needed for prototyping? Personally, I dread the thought of etching my own boards. The process is laborious and involves messy chemicals and specially sensitized PCB’s — none of which interest me. I’ve only ever done it a few times, and have promised myself never to do it again. Professional but cheap PCB manufacturing is more like it board pooling services such as OSH park have made this both easy and affordable — if you can wait for the turnaround.

So what are the alternatives? If you are really serious about swift prototyping from your own Lab, I put forth the case of milling your own PCB’s. Read on as I take you through the typical workflow from design to prototype and convince you to put up with the relatively high start up cost of purchasing a PCB mill.

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Exporting Eagle Libraries To FOSS Tools

December 21, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 39 Comments

Since Autodesk’s acquisition, Eagle has been making waves in the community. The de facto standard for Open Hardware PCB design is now getting push-and-shove routing, a button that flips the board over to the back (genius!), integration with Fusion360, automated 3D renderings of components, and a bunch of other neat tools. However, Eagle is not without its warts, and there is a desire to port those innumerable Eagle board layouts and libraries to other PCB design packages. This tool does just that.

The tool is an extension of pcb-rnd, a FOSS tool for circuit board editing, and this update massively extends support for Eagle boards and libraries. As an example, [VK5HSE] loaded up an Eagle .brd file of a transceiver, selected a pin header, and exported that component to a KiCad library. It worked the first time. For another experiment, the ever popular TV-B-Gone .brd file was exported directly to pcb-rnd. This is a mostly complete solution for Eagle to KiCad, Eagle to Autotrax, and Eagle to gEDA PCB, with a few minimal caveats relating to copper pours and silkscreen — nothing that can’t be dealt with if you’re not mindlessly using the tool.

While it must be noted that most Open Hardware projects fit inside a 80 cm² board area, and can therefore be opened and modified with the free-to-use version of Autodesk’s Eagle, this is a very capable tool to turn Eagle boards and libraries into designs that can be built with FOSS tools.

Thanks [Erich] for the tip.

Friday Hack Chat: Eagle One Year Later

December 14, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 103 Comments

Way back in June of 2016, Autodesk acquired Cadsoft, and with it EagleCAD, the popular PCB design software. There were plans for some features that should have been in Eagle two decades ago, and right now Autodesk is rolling out an impressive list of features that include UX improvements, integration with MCAD and Fusion360, and push and shove routing.

Six months into the new age of Eagle, Autodesk announced they would be changing their licensing models to a subscription service. Where you could pay less than $100 once and hold onto version 6.0 forever, now you’re required to pay $15 every month for your copy of Eagle. Yes, there’s still a free, educational version, but this change to a subscription model caused much consternation in the community when announced.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking about Eagle, one year in. Our guest for this Hack Chat is Matt Berggren, director of Autodesk Circuits, hardware engineer, and technologist that has been working on bringing electronic design to everyone. We’ll be asking Matt all about Eagle, with questions including:

What new features are in the latest edition of Eagle?
What’s on the Eagle wishlist?
What technical challenges arise when designing new features?
Where can a beginner find resources for designing PCBs in Eagle?

Join the chat to hear about new features in Eagle, how things are holding up for Eagle under new ownership, and how exactly the new subscription model for Eagle is going. We’re looking for questions from the community, so if you have a question for Matt or the rest of the Eagle team, put it on the Hack Chat event page.

If you’re wondering about how Altium and KiCad are holding up, or have any questions about these PCB design tools, don’t worry: we’re going to have Hack Chats with these engineers in the new year.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This Hack Chat is going down on noon, PST, Friday, December 15th. Time Zones got you down? Here’s a handy count down timer!

Click that speech bubble to the left, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io.

You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Retrotechtacular: Circuit Boards The Tektronix Way

November 30, 2017 by Jenny List 39 Comments

Printed circuit boards are a fundamental part of both of commercial electronic equipment and of the projects we feature here on Hackaday. Many of us have made our own, whether done so from first principles with a tank of etchant, or sent off as a set of Gerbers to a PCB fab house.

To say that the subject of today’s Retrotechtacular is the manufacture of printed circuit boards might seem odd, because there is nothing archaic about a PCB, they’re very much still with us. But the film below the break is a fascinating look at the process from two angles, both for what it tells us about how they are still manufactured, and how they were manufactured in 1969 when it was made.

Board artwork laid out at four-times actual size

Tektronix were as famous for the manufacturer of particularly high quality oscilloscopes back then as they are now. The Tektronix ‘scopes of the late 1960s featured several printed circuit boards carrying solid-state electronics, and were manufactured to an extremely high standard. The film follows the manufacturing process from initial PCB layout to assembled board, with plenty of detail of all production processes.

In 2017 you would start a PCB design in a CAD package, but in 1969 the was incredibly manual. Everything was transcribed by hand from a paper schematic to transparent film. Paper mock-ups of component footprints four times larger than actual size are placed on a grid, and conductors drawn in pencil on an overlaid piece of tracing paper. Then the pads and pattern of tracks are laid out using black transfers and tape on sheets of film over the tracing paper, one each for top and bottom of the board. A photographic process reduces them to production size onto film, from which they can be exposed and etched in the same way that you would in 2017.

Pantograph drilling machine uses a manually moved styuls on a template to drill six boards at once

Most of the physical process of creating a PCB has not changed significantly since 1969. We are shown the through-plating and gold plating processes in detail, then the etching and silkscreening processes, before seeing component installation and finally wave soldering.

What are anachronistic though are some of the machines, and the parts now robotised that were done in 1969 by hand. The PCB drilling is done by hand with a pantograph drill for small runs, but for large ones a fascinating numerically-controlled drilling rig is used, controlled by punched tape without a computer in sight. Component placement is all by hand, and the commentator remarks that it may one day be done by machine.

The film remains simultaneously an interesting look at PCB production and a fascinating snapshot of 1960s manufacturing. It’s probable that many of the Tek ‘scopes made on that line are still with us, they’re certainly familiar to look at from our experience at radio rallies.

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Entry-Level 3D Printer Becomes Budget PCB Machine

November 27, 2017 by Dan Maloney 34 Comments

A funny thing happened on [Marco Rep]’s way to upgrading his 3D printer. Instead of ending up with a heated bed, his $300 3D printer can now etch 0.2-mm PCB traces. And the results are pretty impressive, all the more so since so little effort and expense were involved.

The printer in question is a Cetus3D, one of the newer generation of affordable machines. The printer has nice linear bearings but not a lot of other amenities, hence [Marco]’s desire to add a heated bed. But hiding beneath the covers was a suspicious transistor wired to a spare connector on the print head; a little sleuthing and a call to the factory revealed that the pin is intended for accessory use and can be controlled from G-code. With a few mods to the cheap UV laser module [Marco] had on hand, a printed holder for the laser, and a somewhat manual software toolchain, PCBs with 0.2-mm traces were soon being etched. The video below shows that the printer isn’t perfect for the job; despite the smooth linear bearings, the low mass of the printer results in vibration that shows up as wavy traces. But the results are more than acceptable, especially for $330.

This isn’t [Marco]’s first budget laser-etching rodeo. He recently tried the same thing using a cheap CNC laser engraver with similar results. That was a $200 dedicated engraver, this is a $300 3D printer with a $30 laser. It seems hard to lose at prices like these.

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Making An Arduino Shield PCB With Fritzing

November 26, 2017 by Donald Papp 15 Comments

[Allan Schwartz] decided to document his experience using Fritzing to design, fabricate, and test a custom Arduino shield PCB, and his step-by-step documentation makes the workflow very clear. Anyone who is curious or has been looking for an opportunity to get started will find [Allan]’s process useful to follow. The PCB in question has two shift registers, eight LEDs, eight buttons, and fits onto an Arduino; it’s just complex enough to demonstrate useful design features and methods while remaining accessible.

[Allan] starts with a basic breadboard design, draws a schematic, prototypes the circuit, then designs the PCB and orders it online, followed by assembly and testing. [Allan] had previously taught himself to use Eagle and etched his own PCBs via the toner transfer method, but decided to use Fritzing instead this time around and found it helpful and easy to use.

About a year ago we saw Fritzing put through its paces for PCB design, and at the time found that it didn’t impress much from an engineering perspective. Regardless, as a hobbyist [Allan] found real value in using Fritzing for his project from beginning to end; he documented both the process and his observations in order to help others, and that’s wonderful.