Here is a guide on how to make your own Ferric Chloride etchant. It’s a relatively simple process that only requires some iron, hydrochloric acid, and air. As the process uses acids please be careful, and do this only if you feel comfortable with it. Get 20g of iron. This can be in the form […]
Tag Archives: pcb
Cost breakdown of Seeed’s PCB service
Mat has gone through the trouble of filling up a spreadsheet with the cost breakdown of Seeed’s PCB service. It seems that the boards with the lowest cost-to-area ratio are the 10cmx10cm ones that are ordered in quantities of 10. For higher quantities it quickly becomes apparent that the larger boards have a lower cost-to-area […]
DIY electroplating and CNC milling PCBs
Here’s a video made by Cpirius of DIY electroplating and CNC milling of PCBs. The electroplating process he uses is good for down to 26mil vias. It looks like cpirius has made a video of his entire PCB prototyping process: Drilling holes, electroplating, mechanically etching and cutting out the board. Read more about the electroplating […]
Box of new PCBs
A box of PCBs just arrived from Seeed Studio’s Fusion PCB service. This batch includes: ATX Breakout Board v1.3 Smoke Tester v1 Bus Pirate Demo Board v5c Logic Shrimp v2b ATX Breakout Board v1.3, Smoke Tester v1, Bus Pirate Demo Board v5c, and Logic Shrimp v2b are available now in the free PCB drawer.
PCB Visualizer – Free online PCB data verification service
PCB Visualizer is a free online PCB verification service. Basically you upload your gerbers, setup the design rule check (DRC), and you get a graphical representation of what your PCB will look like. It points out any problems that didn’t pass the DRC. Via Electronics Lab.
Flickering pumpkin LED designed in KiCAD
Add some LED goodness to this year’s Halloween pumpkins. This flickering LED design on a pumpkin shaped PCB was drawn up in KiCAD. Grab the design files from the low voltage labs site. It’s a simple schematic with just a switch, resistor, battery holder and 10mm LED. But makes for a nice easy project to […]
Ringo3 LED clock assembly
Community at it’s best, one forum member helping another. Matseng sent a Rino3 clock PCB to Arup, which he populated even before the Matseng got a chance to build his own. They are now debugging it together: Few days ago I received one ringo3 PCB from forum member masteng. It’s having 60+60+12 LEDs (ss,mm,hh). The […]
Donatello PCBs arrive
We wrote about Dolabra’s Part Ninja and Superprobe combo idea, the Donatello. It combines the two, and delegates the “brains” to the computer via USB. He sent the PCBs to be fabed via OSHpark, and they just arrived. The boards are in. OSHpark boards are so nice! I hope I can get some time soon […]
Panelize 4 DP6037 standard PCBs on a single cheap PCB order
Schazamp is making a community order of Bus Pirate v4 Sick of Beige PCBs. He decided to use Seeed Studio’ss cheap PCB service and hack together 4 Bus Pirates on one 10x10cm PCB. He hit a little snag with combining the gerbers, but Ernie helped him out. Since the Bus Pirate uses our DP6037 standard PCB […]
Circuit board assembly at SMA’s German factory
Nerdvana tweetted: Interesting PCB assembly infomercial …similiar to eevblog #264 Via TweetDeck.
Dithered images on PCB silk screen
Earlier we posted the rendering of Mats’ dithered PCB silk screen. They turned out great. Quite a few more are posted in the forum as well. The dithered image on two of the boards that I wrote about earlier turned out rather good – much better than I expected. Via the forum.
Gaining experience with schematic and PCB work
Wardy gives some advice on how to improve your schematic and PCB design skills. His advice is to clone consumer products with available schematics. He provides links to a few examples to get you started. Using a realistic design will confront you with the kind of obstacles that present themselves to the original designers themselves […]
PCB design toolkit update
Here’s an update on the PCB design toolkit we posted about earlier: Saturn PCB Design Toolkit Version 5.8 including the new IPC-2152 Update! Changed the formula for Sr in the IPC-2251 Method of the Bandwidth Calculator IPC-2251 stated formula is in error More work to come on the Signal Properties calculator Added Alron 85N to […]
Dithered images on the PCB’s silk layer
Matseng sent out some PCBs for manufacture with an interesting silk layer. He added the dithered image to the back of the PCB using a Floyd-Steinberg filter on the original to give him an image on the silk layer with a 6 mil pixel size. The PCB in the image above is a rendering made from […]
Indian PCB Association Expo 2012
Viswa wrote to us about his visit to the Indian PCB Association Expo 2012 held in Bangalore. This fall we hope to go to India to check out the electronics markets and open source scene. Preparations are in progress, but it is the most complicated Geek Tour we’ve ever attempted. Viswa has been helping us […]
Poison via effect in manufacturing
From the comments on our earlier DIY BGA soldering teardown post, JesseJ points out the poison via effect that will also break the connection to the BGA. Image above is from the previous post, depicting the capillarity effect where a via sucks the ball of solder in, and prevents contact to the BGA. Just as a […]
PCB design toolkit
RichF tipped us about a free download from Saturn PCB Design Inc. It’s a collection of calculators to aid your with PCB design. Stuff like via resistance, trace current cappacity, differential pair inductance etc… It incorporates many features that PCB designers and engineers are in regular need of like current capacity of a PCB trace, […]
Pads tearing off of PCBs
Voidptr got a board from eBay that may have used an exceptionally cheap PCB. He soldered some pinheaders to the board and with slight pressure the pins flew of the board: I just got this ebay board and got a bad surprise, I soldered the header, did not overheat it I’m pretty sure. Connected few […]
Arduino based line following robot
Erdabyz finalized his Arduino-based line following robot. The design is open source and you can download the project files in the forum. He has 20 board which he’d sell for $3.5 +shipping. Via the forum.
Aligning sides on DIY two-sided circuit boards
How to get good alignment results when etching two sided boards at home. This method uses marks placed outside of the PCB design to help with aliment. Via Gadget Factory.