4 ms·

[spoilers] The moment it worked, you could see he was almost in tears. I was almost in tears with him, and I didn't even spend over a month tediously reverse en

[spoilers] The moment it worked, you could see he was almost in tears. I was almost in tears with him, and I didn't even spend over a month tediously reverse engineering this ISA card. What an amazing world we live in where we can design PCBs and get them professionally produced for a pittance. When I was in high school, we were taught how to make PCBs using the old masking and acid etching method. We drew our traces by hand and drilled our own vias. And that was only ~15 years ago! What a magical world we live in!

AshamedCaptain 4y ago
What an amazing world? 15 years ago, there was a shop down the corner that would print me PCBs for a pittance. The only thing I had to do was to drill the vias by hand, something which I would do with a simple mount for an off-the-shelf drill. Today, that shop has been replaced by some brand clothes store of which there are other 17 quasi-identical ones in town. If anything, it is harder today to get this done than it was 15 years ago.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  Drilling and plating vias is the hard part they were skipping.
  - Stamp01 4y ago
    You guys are getting your vias plated? /meme We had to stick a big blob of solder in the hole.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - AshamedCaptain 4y ago
    TBH, I never had any vias plated. I would always use solder and consider soldering overall the most difficult task of the entire process without any doubt, much more annoying and difficult than drilling.
    - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
      That doesn't scale if you're doing a design that needs lots of vias. Particularly so when stitching together ground puddles on 2-layer boards. Soldering jumpers into hundreds of holes isn't practical.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- _Microft 4y ago
  Having a shop in town for rapid iterations of a design sounds awesome. If you want to know what's possible today at which prices, check out these prototyping services for example: https://jlcpcb.com https://jlcpcb.com, https://www.pcbway.com https://www.pcbway.com, https://oshpark.com https://oshpark.com
- Stamp01 4y ago
  If you gave a hacker space in town, maybe at your local library, and they have a decent CNC router, you can probably still get PCBs made locally. I don't know how the price would compare to the big bois like PCBway. They wouldn't end up looking quite as "professional", but it all depends on the price you can get and how much same-day and shopping locally matters to you.

AshamedCaptain 4y ago

What an amazing world? 15 years ago, there was a shop down the corner that would print me PCBs for a pittance. The only thing I had to do was to drill the vias by hand, something which I would do with a simple mount for an off-the-shelf drill. Today, that shop has been replaced by some brand clothes store of which there are other 17 quasi-identical ones in town. If anything, it is harder today to get this done than it was 15 years ago.

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
Drilling and plating vias is the hard part they were skipping.
- Stamp01 4y ago
  You guys are getting your vias plated? /meme We had to stick a big blob of solder in the hole.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  TBH, I never had any vias plated. I would always use solder and consider soldering overall the most difficult task of the entire process without any doubt, much more annoying and difficult than drilling.
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    That doesn't scale if you're doing a design that needs lots of vias. Particularly so when stitching together ground puddles on 2-layer boards. Soldering jumpers into hundreds of holes isn't practical.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
_Microft 4y ago
Having a shop in town for rapid iterations of a design sounds awesome. If you want to know what's possible today at which prices, check out these prototyping services for example: https://jlcpcb.com https://jlcpcb.com, https://www.pcbway.com https://www.pcbway.com, https://oshpark.com https://oshpark.com
Stamp01 4y ago
If you gave a hacker space in town, maybe at your local library, and they have a decent CNC router, you can probably still get PCBs made locally. I don't know how the price would compare to the big bois like PCBway. They wouldn't end up looking quite as "professional", but it all depends on the price you can get and how much same-day and shopping locally matters to you.