[Noisebridge-discuss] Searching for EagleCad workshop, anyone, anyone

[Josh Myer]

First: order a small set of your boards with Laen's batch order when
you have a design.

http://dorkbotpdx.org/wiki/pcb_order

I can't recommend this enough.  It's $5 a square inch for three copies
of your board, he's a totally great guy, and the service he provides
the community is awesome.  The quality is good, the turnaround is
fast, and holy crap is it cheap for a short run.  The next order is
the 25th: get in now.  I got some stuff from him on the last panel,
and it all turned out wonderfully (and is this totally incredible
Grimace/grape color soldermask).  The next set is supposed to be an
even better color; we'll see how it comes out.

There's also BatchPCB for this sort of thing, but Laen is a lot easier
to work with, in my opinion.

To learn Eagle, I started with Sparkfun's tutorial:
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/tutorial_info.php?tutorials_id=108 ,
and then designed lots and lots of boards.  In the last 6 months, I've
designed, err, 50 boards, apparently.  I've only produced a dozen or
of them, mostly with etchant at home, but the practice on the others
was invaluable in learning tricks.  I don't have a problem, I can stop
any time.  Yes.

Don't use autorouting.  Really.  It gives crap results.  If you
absolutely have to, use Freerouting (google it).  It's kind of a pain
to use with Eagle, but its results look far better than Eagle's
autorouter.  I use both autorouters a lot, mostly as a way to get some
hints or brainstorm possible solutions, then hand-route the final
design most of the way.

Other than that, as someone who has run 4 boards off commercially now,
all from Eagle: listen to Jonathan!  Print it all out on paper and
poke parts through.  I independently discovered this trick, so I do it
a little differently:  Get out some foam (you should have gotten some
foam by the time you order a full batch of boards), print out the
board layout, place it on the foam, and start poking things through.
Think about soldering things in: is it too tight?  Is it even
possible?  etc.  Imagine how people are going to be assembling it,
then using it, and what they'd want to see.  This has saved me a lot
of grief.


Other shorter, random things I've found valuable:

 * Learn to do PCB repair.  You're going to need to cut traces and
jumper stuff.  Probably a fair number of them.
 * Get a reasonably nice soldering station.  It makes the above way simpler.
 * Consider using more surface mount devices.  They're easy to work
with at reasonable sizes, and they're way easier to use on home-brew
boards (drilling sucks.)  Also, the "paste and bake" workflow is
incredibly fast relative to soldering down every through hole.
 * Spend a bunch of time reading datasheets, especially the physical
section.  Those drafting/mech drawing classes from High School are
paying off in spades right now.
 * If you have the room on your first copy of any board, put a row of
headers along every pin of every chip on the board, to make it easier
to jumper things in when you find an error.

But, mostly, it's a matter of practice, practice, practice.
--
/jbm

(And, FWIW, my first boards perfectly matched their schematic.
Relatedly, I occasionally run workshops teaching people to
repair/rework PCBs based on a bogus schematic, and have the perfect
kit for it.  Whoops.)