A big box of PCBs arrived from Seeed’s Fusion board service today. Here are a few of the boards that have been mentioned on the blog or in the forum:

• An updated 3EEPROM explorer board
• USB Infrared Toy manufacturing update
• Bus Pirate v4 prototype for developers

Most of these boards won’t be available for months, but the 3EEPROM will go on sale with the Bus Pirate LCD adapter v2 soon.

There’s a lot going on in the lab this morning. Instead of writing a post, we’re going to give away a couple PCBs for an all through-hole version of the USB Infrared Toy. This is part of a kit that probably won’t be made because the through-hole version of the PIC18F2550 is four times the cost of the surface mount version.  Just give us a shout if you’d like one, while they last.

An assembled USB Infrared Toy is available for $20, including worldwide shipping. Each purchase supports the development of this project.

Free from practical constraints on board size, pin counts, layers and output types… Multi-page schematic designs are supported…. supports the importing of Eagle design files and libraries…

It’s not open source, but it could potentially be a favorable closed-ware alternative to Eagle. Eagles’s board size limits don’t usually effect us because we use all SMD parts, and the layer limit is pretty moot because 4layer boards are too expensive for us to prototype.

Multiple sheets is a very attractive feature though. Eagle currently limits you to one sheet, which makes big designs unwieldy. Eagle’s big lock-in seems to be the huge number of user generated part libraries.

For an open alternative, there’s Kicad. We haven’t tried it for a few years, anyone know if it’s been updated?

Via Adafruit.

Do you want your next PCB to be pretty? Here’s how to add custom graphics to a PCB using Eagle.

Via Make.

Double sided home-etched PCBs require a lot of patience and luck. Both sides need to be aligned properly, and via wires have to be soldered between the layers so top and bottom are connected.

The usual process for connecting the layers is to insert a small wire in each via hole and solder it.  This is a tedious, time consuming process. YourITronics documents another way: thread a long wire through all the holes, solder it in place, and cut away the excess. The result, as seen above, is a very small, very clean via connection. There’s even a few under the TQFP chip! We’ll definitely use this tip the next time we make a double sided board at home.