[ELECTRON] Iron on PCB prototyping

[Ross Feilen]

On 15/6/09 14:46, "James G Watt" <kinetic-arts at ntlworld.com> wrote:

> Hi, Just posting this to say if there's going to be a PCB prototyping
> workshop/tutorial please give me a shout. Could you drop me an email?


Hi James,

Sorry I didn't get round to sending this on Saturday evening (bit busy
this weekend!)

Attached here is a pdf of the process for making the boards.

Hope this gives a good overview of our method of building PCBs. We plan
to have another PCB building session soon at the SOLDER group. Anyone
able to send me artwork in advance can arrive on the day with printed
material ready and provided for them (assuming I consider the artwork
feasible for this method - single sided or nearly single sided designs
are most suitable). I don't charge for the materials in these sessions.
I'll email you when this is fitted into the calendar.
 
I have been mainly using artwork from magazines and other articles (ready
made designs). Once or twice where I've had to lay out my own boards I've
used EAGLE, which is available for Mac, Win or Linux. It's limited but free,
so long as you're doing fairly small designs slightly bigger than credit
card size.

I think EAGLE's pretty basic but for most hobby construction jobs it should
be fine. More capable software is around but generally rather expensive.

The technique works round choosing your components in the design package,
and building the circuit diagram using them (schematic). The values of the
components are not important here but what's critically important is you
choose components with the correct footprint (i.e. The locations of their
pads / connector leads, and the silkscreen size of component body). Then you
go into the design layout part of the program and you can drag your
component footprints around and link the tracks up to make your design.
There's a lot of technique involved here and practise makes perfect! I have
some example designs I've made (not very good) but they might give you an
idea.

One important thing to note about PCB design software is that you have to be
aware of the limits of your construction technology and define design rules
to reflect what can be done and what must be disallowed in the design. This
is to prevent you designing tracks, holes or details which are smaller
(higher resolution) than what you can produce using the iron-on technique.
I'm happy to discuss this further if you are interested.
 
 
Ross
SOLDER group leader
radio callsign GM7WED

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