Designing and assembling my first PCB

This and sheet metal manufacturing from Oshcut have been game changers for me

I was actually very surprised myself. As I mentioned in the post, I don't do that type of work so it's all new to me. This got me also interested in CAD. You can design parts and don't need to own the 3d printer, could just get parts manufactured online.

It is unfortunate hope local companies like OSH Park get love too. The marketing of companies like JLC or pcbway whenever I post a hardware project on a website like Hackaday or Hackster always reach out to me to use em. Not that it would matter so many big makers on YT use em.

Yeah golden days for PCBs especially now the golden days for home built PCs seem to be over.

It's a loss leader by JLBPCB to get the high-volume contract. Or so said the head of OshPark eight years ago.[1]

There does seem to be a willingness by Chinese manufacturers to deal with small-volume makers and sellers. Look at the minimum order quantities on Alibaba. That's supposed to be a wholesale market, but often wholesale starts at 2 units.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/PrintedCircuitBoard/comments/9bt5ed...

These days, a one-off PCB is dirt cheap. They’ll provide and solder the components for you, for less money than you could buy them to do it yourself.

What happened is that you can get a set of 5 custom PCBs for about $2. The quality is much higher and you don't have to deal with nasty chemicals. I'll never manually etch a board ever again if I can help it.

Buying custom PCBs from China makes sense if you're interested in making electronics. It was more than a decade ago that the equation shifted to the point that making them at home has only made sense if you're interested in the process of making PCBs themselves.

Things like soldermask, multiple layer stackups and plated holes and vias are standard on dirt-cheap Chinese boards but are challenging and time-consuming to do at home.

I used to do this at home. Either thermal transfer or also used a flat bed plotter with an adapter for a Staedler permanent market to draw directly on the PCB. Fun times. Ferric Choride IIRC for etching or you could also use hydrogen peroxide which was much slower...

And yes drill through holes.

Ofcourse only good for two sided (layers) boards at the most.

In addition to what others said, home-etched PCBs are just much lower quality. We're no longer living in a world where every component has leads on a 2.54 mm grid, so tolerances matter a lot more. Also, SMD means you really need vias and a solder mask.

The problem isn't that people outsource it, it's that they need to outsource to China. That's an abject failure of domestic PCB manufacturers who simply don't want to deal with retail customers.

I still do mine at home, though I mostly only build one-offs with older style thru-hole components where tolerances are not as sensitive.

Usually I can get away with using a simple Sharpie marker mask, though I've also had good luck in the past with the toner transfer method for more intricate designs:

https://www.thompdale.com/pcb_etch/gotee_board_production/Ea...

I knew someone who destroyed three surface pro keyboards with chemical etcher.

I've got a cat and live in a carpeted apartment. I prefer to keep most projects "dry" for that reason.

> Whatever happened to making them at home?

That method works for creating single sided PCBs with through-hole components or rough SMD parts. Double sided PCBs are more effort but still possible.

But everything more complex than that - multiple layers, blind or buried vias, fine-pitch SMD, anything involving clock frequencies higher than say 50-100 MHz or depending on specific impedances or capacitances, or requiring stuff like vias to groundplanes to dissipate heat in copper? No way even for a dedicated hobbyist. And you need special equipment to make a proper stencil if you can't use a soldering iron due to feature size or because it's impossible otherwise (=BGA parts).

And where it gets really spicy is sandgrain sized SMD parts (0201 and smaller). Even for professional repair shops, that size requires experienced experts...

I have a small CNC mill and can carve out a board if I don't have time to wait for ordered boards. It's a pain to set up to get it to cut properly, the boards are either one sided or with no vias, and the lack of solder mask makes it harder to solder, especially for SMD components that rely on the solder blob being a certain shape. Additionally, I find that the traces tend to peel off a little too easily, though that may be down to the Ea-Nasir quality copper clad boards I'm using.

It is pretty fast though, and worth learning if you need to do prototyping quickly. You can have a finished board in just hours instead of a week.

Slight tangent: a long time ago when I was into this hobby, Oshpark was usually the go-to instead of JLCPCB. What happened to them? Macrofab too if anyone's used them.

Their shipping costs are too high.

This is great! Thanks for the detailed write up and suggestions to improve. Like I said, this is my first time doing it and I have no background in EE or PCB design. If I make something else I'll give your suggestions a try.

For a simple-enough design, I'd just route the signals as on a 2-layer board. Play around with placement & orientation of parts to minimize overall trace length. If you have some A-B duo with many connections between them: place those first & then put the other parts.

Then fill the remaining space with power planes. GND on one side, most-used supply voltage on the other side.

That way you reduce/avoid the need for blind (or worse: buried) vias.

Another trick: route signals roughly east-west on one side, roughly north-south on the other side, and use a via where you change direction. Many early (complex!) computer mainboards were done that way on 2-layer boards (often using through-hole IC pins or passives as via).

You shouldn't really need 3+ layers unless you get into high density stuff like many-ball BGA parts & the like.

> So no via is necessary; just connect directly to that pin on each layer (kicad probably did this for you automatically). This trick works with all thru-hole pins.

Note that without a plated through hole (vias are small plated through holes, those designed for component legs are bigger) the solder will only adhere to one side. For mounting large components where vibration may be a problem this will make the pad weaker & more likely to lift off. A plated through hole lets the solder flow through & bond to pads on both sides. So you sometimes do need plated through holes.

Otherwise I agree. These days 4-layer boards are so cheap it's often worth just dedicating an entire layer to ground, and one to power. E.g. Signal, ground, power, signal. All your ground connections become vias. Most of your power connections are vias to a lower inside plane. Your signal traces are available to probe & rework easily. You get a bit of distributed capacitance from the power & ground planes.

It's so funny that you had a similar idea. Are you an electrical engineer or swe? What are you building these days?

I made an old school linear psu for my arp 2600 clone like that. I etched w something else :)

Yes, but not how to copy the paper design to the pcb with the marker pen. I am pretty sure a did the drilling after the etching.

Nothing competes with JLC but circuit hub isn’t terrible

I worked in a PCB shop in the Washington DC area making prototypes and small quantities for 25 years. We closed in 1998.

It is like 1 week between order and delivery. It feels to me that if you can't wait for a week for parts and PCB then maybe project should not exist at a first place.

What kind of part? I use Octopart for a lot of things, like ICs (sometimes some variants are available in low quantities but others aren't and only in thousands).

For stuff like passives it's usually easier to use Digi-Key or Mouser and you can filter by MOQ so you only see things that are available individually.

DigiKey used to be a good place to get. Also design for parts you can get... In the old days you could also get samples from chip companies if you asked nicely. No idea if anyone still does that.

So a lot of this goes away if you try to stick to jlcpcb basic parts from lcsc, and you sort of develop preferred components for things. Another trick is when in a category, for example angular hall sensors, once you have the key attributes like vin, smt, etc, sort by quantity desc to see what parts get heavily stocked, that tends to indicate what is popular in industry and likely to be a good generic fit. Out of the top 10-20 pick according to stock level against price. If youre ordering from jlc, look through lcsc and you can do pcba with them, or get the parts shipped with the pcbs. Otherwise digikey, mouser (good for connectors), farnell, rs etc, roughly in that order. You will quickly learn for a lot of components there are very standard parts everyone uses. Diodes, inductors for example. To some extent if your footprint is already in the jlcpcb library, its popular and use that. Ie theres 1 smd push button that is basic on jlc and has a footprint in kicad default library. Youd be a little crazy to use anything else. Make all your resistors and caps 0603 or 0402, jlc stocks those the most, vs spotty coverage in 0805 or 1206.

But you find each time you find something in a category, a hall sensors, an encoder, a capacitance sensor, gpio expander, adc, you just file that away as kind of solved and next time you hit that part first before finding alts. Over time you have to dig about less and less. But dont bother with things like resistors, caps, etc that are basic. Even mosfets, unless you have special needs the 3 main types jlc has as basic are fine. Dont get some odd package thats technically two mosfets in one, just put down two basic mosfets. And if you do need a more 'advanced' part, look what is on jlc's promo list atm. Theres very popular stm's for example that are prettymuch constantly on promo (promo is they have the part loaded in mid term for some big customer so you might as well piggyback. Means no loading fee. Adds up)

Llm's can be useful for sifting the sand. Narrowed it to like 30 options and still dont know whats the best pick? Export search as csv and ask your favourite stochastic parrot which part would work best for your application and why. Dont ask them for part numbers though, completely pointless.

Part selection is often the bulk of the work in a PCB design, yeah. What tools were you using, though? In general the parametric searches on digikey, mouser, etc are pretty good for the standard components. For stuff like resistors it's generally easiest to find a particular range and pick from those. You might find most of those have a MOQ but they're cheap enough it's usually not a major issue.

You need a project pipeline. I always have 3-4 of them running because of the waiting times.

Maybe, but that's a good use of Claude IMO. How else would one learn--by googling? Claude does the annoying aggregation of data and distills into a list.

I can tell you where Claude wouldn't have been much use: if it didn't fire right up due to a short or voltage drop that might occur during reset propagating through circuit. You're on your own at that point and gotta break out the multimeter.