| Electronics > Beginners |
| Inexpensive & abunduntly available thermal transfer sheet for making PC boards |
| << < (5/5) |
| KL27x:
--- Quote ---Why bother etching your own boards? Decent quality boards can be made fairly cheaply nowadays. --- End quote --- Client: Can you make this board? Me: Probably. What time frame? Client: As soon as possible Me: Ok. Meanwhile, the playoffs are in progress, and the Masters over the weekend. Got family visiting. So I procrastinate for 4 days. Start the board design last night. Taking dimensions and making a drawing. Start the PCB design this afternoon. Couple hours making custom library parts. 30 minutes to put the schematic together. Print, transfer and etch in an hour. Mostly waiting. Board is electrically fairly simple. But the position of contacts and placement holes/slots is fairly critical. I printed the dimension layer and slots in 8 mil thick lines. Place a via over the critical hole positions for a center point. Cut and sand the board to the dimension outlines with the disc sander, removing roughly half the copper line. Dremel with cutoff disc to cut the slots. Spend 20 minutes doing the holes. This involves carefully center punching them under the microscope and then referring to the pcb file for the hole sizes. Then picking out the drill bits with a pair of calipers. Cordless Dremel: bzz, bzz, bzzz. Crazy, but the holes and slots and contacts all seem to be perfectly aligned on the first try. Done. Started it yesterday. Client will have the board tomorrow. Upon which he will procrastinate for a week or two before doing anything with it. I don't really mean procrastinating. We both have plenty of other fish in the fire. I have 4-5 other projects going on right now. If it checks out, I'll order production quantities with no worries. Really just checking the placement of things. I'll make only minor modifications to the routing and vias for the production version. |
| Navigation |
| Message Index |
| Previous page |