9 ms·

Designing and assembling my first PCB

165 points by tadasv 3mo ago

Retr0id 3mo ago
It's incredible how cheap it is to get custom PCBs made at prototype scale these days, even ones with advanced features. It feels like we're living in a golden era of custom manufacturing.
- klysm 3mo ago
  This and sheet metal manufacturing from Oshcut have been game changers for me
  - adamgoodapp 3mo ago
    They were just on Linus Tech Tip.
  - taylor-tg 3mo ago
    To throw another in the mix, SendCutSend has consistently been a reliable and affordable option for 2D cut parts. They recently added CNC machining offerings, though I can't speak to their affordability on that. Overseas will almost always win on price (at least in small quantities), but it's hard to beat the turnaround from local manufacturers...
    - mschuster91 3mo ago
      > Overseas will almost always win on price (at least in small quantities), but it's hard to beat the turnaround from local manufacturers... Overseas can work with crazy turnarounds too. Once I ordered a bunch of stuff from Digikey, and the parcel came around from the tiny village of Thief River Falls MN to rural Bavaria in less than 30 hours, picking/handling included. And free shipping, despite being less than 100€ in volume.
- tadasv 3mo ago
  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.
  - geerlingguy 3mo ago
    Yeah, and since it seems there's some competition there, the prices are decent. You can get milled metal, 3D prints, populated PCBs... crazy what you can do now and how quickly it can be turned around, if you are willing to pay. I wish there were more regional places like PCBWay and JLCPCB in US, EU, etc (with similar pricing) so shipping didn't require circumnavigating the globe.
    - lrasinen 3mo ago
      EU has Aisler but what you win in shipping times you lose in production lead time (unless you pay for faster service). And there are probably others but with even less visibility / willingness to interact with private customers. Hell, I used to live next door to a sales office for a local PCB fab, but they never bothered to answer my inquiry about prototypes. (That's another thing the proto-friendly companies do right: instant quotes without log-in requirement)
      - ipdashc 3mo ago
        > but with even less visibility / willingness to interact with private customers It's honestly depressing. I could believe the theories (off vibes, since I'm not in manufacturing, just a hobbyist) that this is one of the reasons why China is overtaking the West in hardware. Manufacturers here just don't want to talk to you at all unless you're willing to buy a million units, it seems. From what I've heard, in China, it's far easier to get started (and that certainly matches my experience with jlc/pcbway). Like, I get it, profit wise. But it's a bit of a sad state of affairs.
- ge96 3mo ago
  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.
  - Waterluvian 3mo ago
    Is the cost and quality comparable to the Chinese options?
    - bschwindHN 3mo ago
      OshPark's quality is high, but their prices are certainly higher too. Good to support them though if you live in the States, since that's where they manufacture the boards.
      - hananova 3mo ago
        That's kind of the problem though. jlc/pcbway aren't just "cheaper", for anything 2 or 4 layer that doesn't require special coatings, thickness, or finish such as gold fingers, it's just so cheap and fast that it makes no financial sense to buy locally. You'd pay several hundred percents more to get the boards maybe 1-2 business days earlier. In addition, china is where all the world's pcbs are made, even for commercial stuff, it's not unreasonable to expect them to deliver higher and more consistent quality than home fabs. The gap only begins to slightly close at more complex boards, but not that much.
        wildzzz 3mo ago
        OSHPark is more comparable to JLC if you squeeze your design down to the absolute smallest footprint. They market to hobbyists but only in the sense that you're doing this as a side project to your regular hardware engineering job and have access to a rework station to install 0402s and BGAs (i.e. you have the skills and tools to actually design and build a tiny board). I wouldn't use OSHPark to make something the size of a conference badge unless I specifically needed it to be domestically produced or I was selling it. JLC offers purple and black soldermask too.
- amelius 3mo ago
  Yeah golden days for PCBs especially now the golden days for home built PCs seem to be over.
- Animats 3mo ago
  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/how_come_jlcpcb_be_so_cheap_compared_to_others/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PrintedCircuitBoard/comments/9bt5ed...
  - edg5000 3mo ago
    Their PCB service must be a loss leader, but their assembly service might be profitable. What's also a loss leader is their default configuration. Want .2mm vias? That's another 30$. Want to assemble both sides? More fees. So it gets more profitable for them not just with volume, but also with designs that require the add-on fees.
fatih-erikli-cg 3mo ago
[dead]
1024bits 3mo ago
JLCPCB is often the manufacturer of choice with DIY PCBs, and the reputation is well deserved. I recommend them as well, have never had an issue with what they've made. It's a bit pricier for a one-off board given the MOC, so it's preferable to do some sort of group buy if you can.
- krapht 3mo ago
  Slight tangent: a long time ago when I was into this hobby, Oshpark was usually the go-to instead of JLCPCB. What happened to them? Macrofab too if anyone's used them.
  - hananova 3mo ago
    Simple: jlcpcb can deliver you 10 boards for anything a hobbyist will likely need for 10$ including shipping, and it ships in 24 hours. Oshpark cannot compete with that.
  - taylor-tg 3mo ago
    I don't think anything necessarily happened to OSHPark so much as JLC became the default for a lot of people. I find the defining factor is just consistency mixed with capabilities. Even if one could conceivably get a specific PCB stackup quicker from a US company, being able to order basically any type of PCB (and increasingly more than just PCBs) from a single vendor is a pretty significant value-add. There are US shops like Advanced Circuits that can turn boards around extremely quickly, but obviously you are paying for that speed. Most people ordering a handful of boards for a hobby project, or prototype are probably optimizing more for cost and consistency than shaving a few days off the lead time. Once someone finds a vendor where they know the quality will meet whatever their own subjective minimum is, there's not much incentive to shop around. Being able to tack on assembly at JLC with a single checkbox also exponentially increases the desire to just stick with that vendor.
  - willis936 3mo ago
    OSHPark is bare board fab only but JLC does turnkey. I've enjoyed working with CircuitHub for turnkey prototypes. I'm not in love with the web interface (source files must be uploaded so if you have silkscreen that has dynamic parameters you need to make a ticket and the BOM parser misses stuff very often so every project needs an audit).
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
dhosek 3mo ago
OK, so people are ordering a custom PCB from China for a one-off? Whatever happened to making them at home? I remember my brothers doing this in the bathroom sink with a board coated with copper¹, some special markers to draw the circuit on the board and chemicals to wash off the extra copper. I’m guessing they might have used our dad’s electric drill to put some holes in the board as well, but looking at the article, this doesn’t seem like an order from China need. ⸻ 1. Some details may be incorrect as I was 10, this was the late 70s and I only saw the results, not the process.
- danielheath 3mo ago
  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.
- Legend2440 3mo ago
  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.
  - ErroneousBosh 3mo ago
    Ferric chloride isn't that nasty, it just stains everything. Electricity costs 25 pence per kWh here. I don't have to make many boards before JLC becomes cheaper than firing up the heated bubble etch tank. I first started using JLC instead of etching at home in early 2020, and since then I've had a small child, so yeah I'm not running the bubble tank with a 6-year-old running around. Maybe in a couple of years we'll do one by hand, drawing the tracks on the PCB with a Dalo pen and so on, because I remember doing that with my dad when I wasn't much older than my son is now. But that is definitely going to be an Outside Toy.
- stephen_g 3mo ago
  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.
dsign 3mo ago
PCBs are very neat, but that shipping time is a boomer when you are prototyping and you really don’t know what you are doing.
- BlackRabbit1 3mo ago
  You need a project pipeline. I always have 3-4 of them running because of the waiting times.
LoganDark 3mo ago
I've been trying to make a PCB but it's just so annoying having to sift through pages and pages of listings in order to find each individual tiny component without minimum order quantities of hundreds or more. The process of finding each component is so tedious that I gave up. (I was using EasyEDA hoping it would be easy to find components I could actually order -- nope)
- stephen_g 3mo ago
  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.
  - LoganDark 3mo ago
    the most annoying was stuff like resistors or capacitors. They tended to have huge minimum order quantities, there were hundreds of results for any kind of query and most of them were always out of stock. I wanted to stick to JLCPCB's platform so that I could order the boards pre-populated, but I didn't want to be stuck ordering far more components than the board actually needs. I always feel anger or something when I see some YouTuber say they easily made a board and ordered it pre-assembled from JLCPCB. They make it sound like it's so painless, but for me it's mostly searching through part listings trying to find one without a minimum order quantity of like 100, because there are no filters or sorts for that
    - rcxdude 3mo ago
      Were the MOQ for the resistors a major contributer to cost? Usually they're super cheap so even buying 100 is not a crazy problem. Also most PCB assemblers will have a generic component library for common resistor and capacitor values and footprints, which they encourage you to use anyhow because it's less hassle for them (they're often not even charged per part). (And if you're assembling them yourself, then you can also buy kits of the common ranges to save the hassle and cost of having to maintain a stock)
bschwindHN 3mo ago
Wow, very very similar to my first PCB, a breakout board for the TSL4531. I ordered it from OshPark back in 2016. Used the exact same soldering iron, and a Quick hot air station, though it's the less fancy one than you have. https://github.com/bschwind/tsl4531-module https://github.com/bschwind/tsl4531-module https://imgur.com/ozk7UuS https://imgur.com/ozk7UuS (sorry for imgur, not sure what people use for image hosts these days) I then went on to also make a BME280 breakout: https://github.com/bschwind/bme280-module https://github.com/bschwind/bme280-module From there on I've made various PCBs, and thankfully they've pretty much all worked on the first try. I do take a lot of extra time to verify the design and double check all the datasheets.
- tadasv 3mo ago
  It's so funny that you had a similar idea. Are you an electrical engineer or swe? What are you building these days?
  - bschwindHN 3mo ago
    I work on software and a bit of hardware for my job, at tonari. It's basically a low latency video "portal" to connect spaces. My most recent hardware project was to add an OLED display + rotary encoder dial to the product. That was a fun project, and it turned out great! It was also my first time doing a 4 layer board and having to worry at least a little bit about EMI and all that. All my previous stuff has been lower speed 2 layer stuff, like a custom mechanical keyboard.
enzo05814648 3mo ago
Nice board, looking forward to seeing your next one. A little feedback, helpful I hope: A "via" is basically just a wire stuck right through the whole board top-to-bottom. (Okay, it's not really a wire. They drill a hole and then chemically grow a layer of copper that fills the hole.) You can connect the copper pattern on any layer(s) to that "wire", so it's often used to route a signal from one layer to the other. But you already have a real wire going through the board: the GND header pin! 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. For RF or high-current applications, sometimes you cover a board with a grid of vias, just making redundant connections between the planes all over the place, "stitching" them together. But careful, add too many vias and the PCB shop will bill you extra. Putting a GND pour on the top layer is a good idea. It's lower-impedance than individual skinny traces, and takes less/zero effort to route. The GND trace you manually routed isn't necessary; you can see by the transparent-red shape that kicad already has copper there. However, you ended up with a little "island" of dead copper between R2 and C2, which is the real reason you needed the via. A better approach would be to use the bottom layer for +3.3V power instead of a redundant ground pour. This gets rid of the +3.3V traces (BTW, best to use a single, thicker one instead of 2x side-by-side) and unifies the island into the ground pour. Even though this is a micro-power application, playing the traveling-salesman game with long scraggly power traces is never a good idea. You would still need vias to connect each top-layer +3.3V SMD pad to the bottom-layer power plane, but the signal-integrity benefits of a plane make this worth it. Maybe the absolute best is an uninterrupted GND plane on the bottom and a +3.3V pour on the top. Putting SMDs on the bottom side makes the board cost more, so good call leaving them all on top, but putting traces on the bottom layer is free. So you can even move signal traces between layers to avoid cutting up your planes too much. It's "fun" with big complex boards, like untying a giant knot... You are very miserly with your +3.3V global net symbols in the schematic! You can place as many as you want to optimize the schematic's readability. Especially near the CSB pin, the 4-way solder dot looks like some intermediate signal in a voltage divider, but it's actually just +3.3V. Same suggestion with GND -- basically, it's more informative to read "this pin is GND, and this pin is GND" than "these two pins are connected, I wonder what they're doing...oh, it's all GND". Pull-up resistors are usually oriented vertically, too, so they graphically pull "up"! Anyway...I hope you don't mind all my constructive criticism. It's nice to see something on HN I know about!
peter_retief 3mo ago
I have made boards but never actually used them (the delay between need and supply is too long for me) I wish I could 3d print a board with all its components - instant gratification (which incidentally was one of my half baked projects)
- Geof25 3mo ago
  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.
Animats 3mo ago
This guy, with his air quality sensor, should get together with the guy yesterday that built a fan controller. Connected, fans could turn on when really needed. That's the basis of intelligent HVAC.
jimnotgym 3mo ago
Does anyone else remember when designing and assembling your first pcb involved marker pens and ferric chloride?
- olelele 3mo ago
  I made an old school linear psu for my arp 2600 clone like that. I etched w something else :)
- MeteorMarc 3mo ago
  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.
greatony 3mo ago
Did you find out that designing, manufacturing and testing PCBs are very interesting, but also very exhausting. You have quite a lot of repetitive jobs, especially paper work to do.
JKCalhoun 3mo ago
It's always cool to see people discover KiCad and the amazing world we live in now where a hobbyist can come up with something that can masquerade as a commercial offering. The transition to SMD and having the "fab" do the assembly was another hurdle for me. Now I tend to consult LCSC Electronics at the same time I am designing my circuit: checking availability and price of the various components I am proposing to use in my design.
- BlackRabbit1 3mo ago
  [dead]
proee 3mo ago
Are there any low cost US based PCB mfgs? Part of me thinks we should support our local supply chains, or should I not care?
- klysm 3mo ago
  Nothing competes with JLC but circuit hub isn’t terrible
- memcg 3mo ago
  I worked in a PCB shop in the Washington DC area making prototypes and small quantities for 25 years. We closed in 1998.
dmvvilela 3mo ago
i suck at welding
mmmlinux 3mo ago
This feels like you asked claude how to make a PCB.
- matltc 3mo ago
  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.

165 points by tadasv 3mo ago

It's incredible how cheap it is to get custom PCBs made at prototype scale these days, even ones with advanced features. It feels like we're living in a golden era of custom manufacturing.

klysm 3mo ago
This and sheet metal manufacturing from Oshcut have been game changers for me
- adamgoodapp 3mo ago
  They were just on Linus Tech Tip.
- taylor-tg 3mo ago
  To throw another in the mix, SendCutSend has consistently been a reliable and affordable option for 2D cut parts. They recently added CNC machining offerings, though I can't speak to their affordability on that. Overseas will almost always win on price (at least in small quantities), but it's hard to beat the turnaround from local manufacturers...
  - mschuster91 3mo ago
    > Overseas will almost always win on price (at least in small quantities), but it's hard to beat the turnaround from local manufacturers... Overseas can work with crazy turnarounds too. Once I ordered a bunch of stuff from Digikey, and the parcel came around from the tiny village of Thief River Falls MN to rural Bavaria in less than 30 hours, picking/handling included. And free shipping, despite being less than 100€ in volume.
tadasv 3mo ago
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.
- geerlingguy 3mo ago
  Yeah, and since it seems there's some competition there, the prices are decent. You can get milled metal, 3D prints, populated PCBs... crazy what you can do now and how quickly it can be turned around, if you are willing to pay. I wish there were more regional places like PCBWay and JLCPCB in US, EU, etc (with similar pricing) so shipping didn't require circumnavigating the globe.
  - lrasinen 3mo ago
    EU has Aisler but what you win in shipping times you lose in production lead time (unless you pay for faster service). And there are probably others but with even less visibility / willingness to interact with private customers. Hell, I used to live next door to a sales office for a local PCB fab, but they never bothered to answer my inquiry about prototypes. (That's another thing the proto-friendly companies do right: instant quotes without log-in requirement)
    - ipdashc 3mo ago
      > but with even less visibility / willingness to interact with private customers It's honestly depressing. I could believe the theories (off vibes, since I'm not in manufacturing, just a hobbyist) that this is one of the reasons why China is overtaking the West in hardware. Manufacturers here just don't want to talk to you at all unless you're willing to buy a million units, it seems. From what I've heard, in China, it's far easier to get started (and that certainly matches my experience with jlc/pcbway). Like, I get it, profit wise. But it's a bit of a sad state of affairs.
ge96 3mo ago
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.
- Waterluvian 3mo ago
  Is the cost and quality comparable to the Chinese options?
  - bschwindHN 3mo ago
    OshPark's quality is high, but their prices are certainly higher too. Good to support them though if you live in the States, since that's where they manufacture the boards.
    - hananova 3mo ago
      That's kind of the problem though. jlc/pcbway aren't just "cheaper", for anything 2 or 4 layer that doesn't require special coatings, thickness, or finish such as gold fingers, it's just so cheap and fast that it makes no financial sense to buy locally. You'd pay several hundred percents more to get the boards maybe 1-2 business days earlier. In addition, china is where all the world's pcbs are made, even for commercial stuff, it's not unreasonable to expect them to deliver higher and more consistent quality than home fabs. The gap only begins to slightly close at more complex boards, but not that much.
      - wildzzz 3mo ago
        OSHPark is more comparable to JLC if you squeeze your design down to the absolute smallest footprint. They market to hobbyists but only in the sense that you're doing this as a side project to your regular hardware engineering job and have access to a rework station to install 0402s and BGAs (i.e. you have the skills and tools to actually design and build a tiny board). I wouldn't use OSHPark to make something the size of a conference badge unless I specifically needed it to be domestically produced or I was selling it. JLC offers purple and black soldermask too.
amelius 3mo ago
Yeah golden days for PCBs especially now the golden days for home built PCs seem to be over.
Animats 3mo ago
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/how_come_jlcpcb_be_so_cheap_compared_to_others/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PrintedCircuitBoard/comments/9bt5ed...
- edg5000 3mo ago
  Their PCB service must be a loss leader, but their assembly service might be profitable. What's also a loss leader is their default configuration. Want .2mm vias? That's another 30$. Want to assemble both sides? More fees. So it gets more profitable for them not just with volume, but also with designs that require the add-on fees.

fatih-erikli-cg 3mo ago

[dead]

1024bits 3mo ago

JLCPCB is often the manufacturer of choice with DIY PCBs, and the reputation is well deserved. I recommend them as well, have never had an issue with what they've made. It's a bit pricier for a one-off board given the MOC, so it's preferable to do some sort of group buy if you can.

krapht 3mo ago
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.
- hananova 3mo ago
  Simple: jlcpcb can deliver you 10 boards for anything a hobbyist will likely need for 10$ including shipping, and it ships in 24 hours. Oshpark cannot compete with that.
- taylor-tg 3mo ago
  I don't think anything necessarily happened to OSHPark so much as JLC became the default for a lot of people. I find the defining factor is just consistency mixed with capabilities. Even if one could conceivably get a specific PCB stackup quicker from a US company, being able to order basically any type of PCB (and increasingly more than just PCBs) from a single vendor is a pretty significant value-add. There are US shops like Advanced Circuits that can turn boards around extremely quickly, but obviously you are paying for that speed. Most people ordering a handful of boards for a hobby project, or prototype are probably optimizing more for cost and consistency than shaving a few days off the lead time. Once someone finds a vendor where they know the quality will meet whatever their own subjective minimum is, there's not much incentive to shop around. Being able to tack on assembly at JLC with a single checkbox also exponentially increases the desire to just stick with that vendor.
- willis936 3mo ago
  OSHPark is bare board fab only but JLC does turnkey. I've enjoyed working with CircuitHub for turnkey prototypes. I'm not in love with the web interface (source files must be uploaded so if you have silkscreen that has dynamic parameters you need to make a ticket and the BOM parser misses stuff very often so every project needs an audit).

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

dhosek 3mo ago

OK, so people are ordering a custom PCB from China for a one-off? Whatever happened to making them at home? I remember my brothers doing this in the bathroom sink with a board coated with copper¹, some special markers to draw the circuit on the board and chemicals to wash off the extra copper. I’m guessing they might have used our dad’s electric drill to put some holes in the board as well, but looking at the article, this doesn’t seem like an order from China need. ⸻ 1. Some details may be incorrect as I was 10, this was the late 70s and I only saw the results, not the process.

danielheath 3mo ago
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.
Legend2440 3mo ago
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.
- ErroneousBosh 3mo ago
  Ferric chloride isn't that nasty, it just stains everything. Electricity costs 25 pence per kWh here. I don't have to make many boards before JLC becomes cheaper than firing up the heated bubble etch tank. I first started using JLC instead of etching at home in early 2020, and since then I've had a small child, so yeah I'm not running the bubble tank with a 6-year-old running around. Maybe in a couple of years we'll do one by hand, drawing the tracks on the PCB with a Dalo pen and so on, because I remember doing that with my dad when I wasn't much older than my son is now. But that is definitely going to be an Outside Toy.
stephen_g 3mo ago
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.

dsign 3mo ago

PCBs are very neat, but that shipping time is a boomer when you are prototyping and you really don’t know what you are doing.

BlackRabbit1 3mo ago
You need a project pipeline. I always have 3-4 of them running because of the waiting times.

LoganDark 3mo ago

I've been trying to make a PCB but it's just so annoying having to sift through pages and pages of listings in order to find each individual tiny component without minimum order quantities of hundreds or more. The process of finding each component is so tedious that I gave up. (I was using EasyEDA hoping it would be easy to find components I could actually order -- nope)

stephen_g 3mo ago
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.
- LoganDark 3mo ago
  the most annoying was stuff like resistors or capacitors. They tended to have huge minimum order quantities, there were hundreds of results for any kind of query and most of them were always out of stock. I wanted to stick to JLCPCB's platform so that I could order the boards pre-populated, but I didn't want to be stuck ordering far more components than the board actually needs. I always feel anger or something when I see some YouTuber say they easily made a board and ordered it pre-assembled from JLCPCB. They make it sound like it's so painless, but for me it's mostly searching through part listings trying to find one without a minimum order quantity of like 100, because there are no filters or sorts for that
  - rcxdude 3mo ago
    Were the MOQ for the resistors a major contributer to cost? Usually they're super cheap so even buying 100 is not a crazy problem. Also most PCB assemblers will have a generic component library for common resistor and capacitor values and footprints, which they encourage you to use anyhow because it's less hassle for them (they're often not even charged per part). (And if you're assembling them yourself, then you can also buy kits of the common ranges to save the hassle and cost of having to maintain a stock)

bschwindHN 3mo ago

Wow, very very similar to my first PCB, a breakout board for the TSL4531. I ordered it from OshPark back in 2016. Used the exact same soldering iron, and a Quick hot air station, though it's the less fancy one than you have. https://github.com/bschwind/tsl4531-module https://github.com/bschwind/tsl4531-module https://imgur.com/ozk7UuS https://imgur.com/ozk7UuS (sorry for imgur, not sure what people use for image hosts these days) I then went on to also make a BME280 breakout: https://github.com/bschwind/bme280-module https://github.com/bschwind/bme280-module From there on I've made various PCBs, and thankfully they've pretty much all worked on the first try. I do take a lot of extra time to verify the design and double check all the datasheets.

tadasv 3mo ago
It's so funny that you had a similar idea. Are you an electrical engineer or swe? What are you building these days?
- bschwindHN 3mo ago
  I work on software and a bit of hardware for my job, at tonari. It's basically a low latency video "portal" to connect spaces. My most recent hardware project was to add an OLED display + rotary encoder dial to the product. That was a fun project, and it turned out great! It was also my first time doing a 4 layer board and having to worry at least a little bit about EMI and all that. All my previous stuff has been lower speed 2 layer stuff, like a custom mechanical keyboard.

enzo05814648 3mo ago

Nice board, looking forward to seeing your next one. A little feedback, helpful I hope: A "via" is basically just a wire stuck right through the whole board top-to-bottom. (Okay, it's not really a wire. They drill a hole and then chemically grow a layer of copper that fills the hole.) You can connect the copper pattern on any layer(s) to that "wire", so it's often used to route a signal from one layer to the other. But you already have a real wire going through the board: the GND header pin! 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. For RF or high-current applications, sometimes you cover a board with a grid of vias, just making redundant connections between the planes all over the place, "stitching" them together. But careful, add too many vias and the PCB shop will bill you extra. Putting a GND pour on the top layer is a good idea. It's lower-impedance than individual skinny traces, and takes less/zero effort to route. The GND trace you manually routed isn't necessary; you can see by the transparent-red shape that kicad already has copper there. However, you ended up with a little "island" of dead copper between R2 and C2, which is the real reason you needed the via. A better approach would be to use the bottom layer for +3.3V power instead of a redundant ground pour. This gets rid of the +3.3V traces (BTW, best to use a single, thicker one instead of 2x side-by-side) and unifies the island into the ground pour. Even though this is a micro-power application, playing the traveling-salesman game with long scraggly power traces is never a good idea. You would still need vias to connect each top-layer +3.3V SMD pad to the bottom-layer power plane, but the signal-integrity benefits of a plane make this worth it. Maybe the absolute best is an uninterrupted GND plane on the bottom and a +3.3V pour on the top. Putting SMDs on the bottom side makes the board cost more, so good call leaving them all on top, but putting traces on the bottom layer is free. So you can even move signal traces between layers to avoid cutting up your planes too much. It's "fun" with big complex boards, like untying a giant knot... You are very miserly with your +3.3V global net symbols in the schematic! You can place as many as you want to optimize the schematic's readability. Especially near the CSB pin, the 4-way solder dot looks like some intermediate signal in a voltage divider, but it's actually just +3.3V. Same suggestion with GND -- basically, it's more informative to read "this pin is GND, and this pin is GND" than "these two pins are connected, I wonder what they're doing...oh, it's all GND". Pull-up resistors are usually oriented vertically, too, so they graphically pull "up"! Anyway...I hope you don't mind all my constructive criticism. It's nice to see something on HN I know about!

peter_retief 3mo ago

I have made boards but never actually used them (the delay between need and supply is too long for me) I wish I could 3d print a board with all its components - instant gratification (which incidentally was one of my half baked projects)

Geof25 3mo ago
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.

Animats 3mo ago

This guy, with his air quality sensor, should get together with the guy yesterday that built a fan controller. Connected, fans could turn on when really needed. That's the basis of intelligent HVAC.

jimnotgym 3mo ago

Does anyone else remember when designing and assembling your first pcb involved marker pens and ferric chloride?

olelele 3mo ago
I made an old school linear psu for my arp 2600 clone like that. I etched w something else :)
MeteorMarc 3mo ago
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.

greatony 3mo ago

Did you find out that designing, manufacturing and testing PCBs are very interesting, but also very exhausting. You have quite a lot of repetitive jobs, especially paper work to do.

JKCalhoun 3mo ago

It's always cool to see people discover KiCad and the amazing world we live in now where a hobbyist can come up with something that can masquerade as a commercial offering. The transition to SMD and having the "fab" do the assembly was another hurdle for me. Now I tend to consult LCSC Electronics at the same time I am designing my circuit: checking availability and price of the various components I am proposing to use in my design.

BlackRabbit1 3mo ago
[dead]

proee 3mo ago

Are there any low cost US based PCB mfgs? Part of me thinks we should support our local supply chains, or should I not care?

klysm 3mo ago
Nothing competes with JLC but circuit hub isn’t terrible
memcg 3mo ago
I worked in a PCB shop in the Washington DC area making prototypes and small quantities for 25 years. We closed in 1998.

dmvvilela 3mo ago

i suck at welding

mmmlinux 3mo ago

This feels like you asked claude how to make a PCB.

matltc 3mo ago
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.