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Design for manufacture
SparkFun has posted an excellent guide to the many different issues you could run into when you finally decide to get a circuit board professionally produced. We assume that most of you aren’t running...
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Look at Your Gerber Files with Gerbv
Tired of making kindergarten macaroni art PCBs? Check your Gerber files before you send them off to a fab house with a Gerber file viewer. Viewplot , GerbTool’s Viewer , and FAB 3000 Free DFM are all...
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Give KiCAD a try. Here’s how
Up to this point we’ve used Eagle CAD as our exclusive PCB design and schematic layout tool. But [Brian] has inspired us to try something different thanks to his KiCAD tutorial. KiCAD is an open...
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Visualizing PCB revisions using a Gerber viewer
We all know that Eagle has its share of shortcomings. Instructables user [westfw] was particularly annoyed by the fact that while Eagle keeps copies of up to 10 revisions of your board, it cannot open...
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DIY Pick and Place just getting under way
It’s not totally fair to say that this project is just getting under way. But the truth is it neither picks nor places so there’s a long road still to travel. But we’re impressed with the...
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Recreate a PCB with a Scanner and Inkscape
[John] has managed to replace a broken turn signal PCB by scanning it and converting to Gerber format. [John] purchased a Triumph Spitfire with toggle switch wired up for turn signal control. The...
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Circuit Plotting With An HP Plotter
Over the last few years we’ve seen a few commercial products that aim to put an entire PCB fab line on a desktop. As audacious as that sounds, there were a few booths showing off just that at CES last...
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Solder Stencils with a 3D Printer
If you are soldering with paste, a stencil makes life a lot easier. Sure, you can apply paste by hand with a syringe, but a modern PCB might have hundreds or even thousands of pads. Like a lot of us,...
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The Gerber Behind Gerber Files
When we create a printed circuit board, the chances are these days that we’ll export it through our CAD package’s CAM tool, and send the resulting files to an inexpensive PCB fabrication house. A...
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Homemade Test Jig Is Cheaper Than Outsourcing
In the past, [Sjaak] has had his testing and programming jigs made for him in Shenzhen, but realized they weren’t that great of a value. They weren’t terribly expensive in the grand scheme of things,...
View ArticleThese Wire Strippers Are Made From PCBs
The rise in cheap PCB fabrication has made old-school prototyping methods such as wire wrapping somewhat passé, but it still has its place. And if you’re going to wire wrap, you’re going to want a...
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SVG To Gerber, Without The Pain
We’ve all marveled at the high quality PCB artwork used within the #BadgeLife and other communities to produce eye-catching designs, but those of you who have dipped your toes in the PCB artwork water...
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JavaScript App Uses Advanced Math to Make PCBs Easier to Etch
We all remember the litany from various math classes we’ve taken, where frustration at a failure to understand a difficult concept bubbles over into the classic, “When am I ever going to need to know...
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Silkscreen Busy? Put Labels Inside Pads
When making a PCB informative and self-documenting, there’s often just not enough space to silkscreen all the labels you want, and slowly but surely, you collect a set of tricks: using different...
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