After a lot of head scratching, I’m getting ready to have some prototype boards made. Here’s a recent version of the Gerber files:
And here’s a 3D rendering of the same which was astonishingly easy to do (I’m not going to finish it or fix the quirks – this was just to try out Eagle 3D):
You’re looking at eight tiny boards, most of which have already been presented in recent posts. It’s also eight ways to mess up in some more or less silly way, but hey that’s all part of the game.
Unlike the software design-code-test-rinse-and-repeat cycle, which can be done many many times per hour, the cycle time for hardware project runs like these is measured in weeks. W e e k s !
Since I don’t expect these boards to be right on the first iteration, this means that at least some of them will be more than a month off before I can declare victory and start using this stuff all over the place. But then again, each of the boards is in itself fairly simple, who knows…
Ok, I’ll do one last round of checking, tweaking, and re-generating the final Gerber files, and then the waiting starts…
Patience. Drat.
Hello Jean-Claude,
I just found that via hackaday.com: http://www.fullspectrumengineering.com/pcbinkjet.html maybe this is interesting for you if you want to test the board before sending them to be mass-produced.
regards, Henning
Thanks. But home made boards have no solder mask and no plated-through copper, so I’d rather not invest in doing this myself. I’m only having 3 board prototypes made – this will let me check out all the aspects of the board, including labeling. I’ve collected lots of plugs on one board to lower the individual cost a bit.