I've gotten into PCB design the last month or two. It is surprisingly accessible and super fun! I'm using Eagle and have had boards made by OSH Park. My firs

I've gotten into PCB design the last month or two. It is surprisingly accessible and super fun! I'm using Eagle and have had boards made by OSH Park. My first goal is a FPGA dev board, not altogether unlike the FPGA module on bunnie's laptop. The board I envision has a USB interface (for FPGA configuration and communication with host computer), a few peripherals and high speed IO header. I broke the project into three steps: a microcontroller board with USB interface not unlike the Arduino Leonardo (built and working), a board with a small (= cheap) FPGA to experiment with soldering BGAs (board just back from the fab), and the final design. The ultimate chip I want to use is a BGA, which needs to be soldered with a process called reflow. (Basically, you bake the board in an oven.) So as a side project, I'm modifying a toaster oven into a reflow oven with the first microcontroller board as the controller. Lots of people have done this; you can find tutorials online. I started with an AVR chip for the USB, but I'm planning to switch to a ARM Cortex series M chip (STM32F4, only a few dollars more but way more capable) in later boards. Have fun!