To manufacture silkscreen printing nail bed, supporting nails should be deployed at the place where the bottom board of nail bed is compatible with PCB board edge or via positions. Therefore, continuous printing of soldermask for both sides of PCB can be implemented so that dwell time and heating time can be reduced to improve circuit board manufacturing efficiency. ![]() I didn't try the 3rd party autorouter.Soldermask with double-side silkscreen printing refers to the process in which liquid soldermask is printed on one side of PCB prior to liquid soldermask printing on the other side using silkscreen printing nail bed. Instead of making a netlist, I just add parts, connect with ratlines, and route manually. You can put a resistor in a capacitor footprint if you want to. Instead of finding parts in a large database, you search for footprints in a small database. I think this works well for simple circuits. FreePCB: A completely different paradigm. Express PCB: Easy to use but does have some brain dead features ( like parts that need to be ungrouped, pins assigned and then regrouped ) Boards are very expensive and only after ordering will they give you the gerbers. EasyEda: I played with it as much as I could without signing up. It seems to be designed to reduce the need for vias. Apparently there is a handle somewhere that you need to click on. I clicked and clicked to select a part without success. I loaded and played with an example circuit. It was totally outdated and nothing worked as described. Eagle: I started with the tutorial which was a bad start. KiCad: It was a 1 gig download, I didn't install it. The autorouter seems to produce many design rule errors that need to be fixed. Finding the part you want in a large database is frustrating. DipTrace: I found this useful and I may use it again. I find learning someone else's software sometimes very frustrating. I recently was looking for a free program and tried a bunch of them. JLCPCB also has an inexpensive assembly service, but you need to use the parts they have in stock (they do have a big inventory). ![]() I ordered the bare boards from JLCPCB, and I assemble them here. I've sent well over a dozen board designs to JLCPCB and the quality has always been excellent. ![]() That's $1.40 per board (four layers, but there's hardly a difference if you go with two layers.) Slow shipping cost me $8.59, and that was for this board and another one. For example, I just had five of these boards fabricated for a total of $7. Quick shipping is pricey, but it you can wait a couple of weeks it can be quite inexpensive. I just zip the KiCad-generated Gerber and drill files, upload the zip to the JLCPCB website and within a couple of days they have the boards made. I use JLCPCB (in China) and it couldn't be easier or cheaper. A friend uses OshPark for his PCB fabrication, and I understand that they are pretty reasonable. I built my own library, and use almost exclusively surface-mount devices, but the default library has through-hole as well as SMT parts. I'm using the latest (V 7.0.1) and it keeps getting better. I'm a retired electronics engineer, not a PCB layout expert, but it didn't take long to be pretty comfortable with KiCad. KiCad is actually pretty easy to use, and it comes with a decent component library. You can even get them to build the board. I have been using lately but there are a lot to choose from. Here is a Eagle file showing a complex but cheap board: *kuvfm4*_ga*MTg3NTE3NzIzNS4xNjc4ODQ1OTA4*_ga_NEXN8H46L5*MTY3ODg0NTkwOC4xLjEuMTY3ODg0NTkzNS4wLjAuMA. ![]() You submit them online and you will get an instant quote. Once you are done the program will generate all the files needed to go to a PCB house. Components don’t have to be connected on the PBC if you name the nets the same on two connected components. You then start replacing the nets with PCB traces. When you go to the PCB layout you move the components around and the nets stay attached. The workflow is you draw the schematic and the wires are turned into Nets. I would recommend picking one and sticking with it. I use KiCAD and Eagle depending on the project. The hard part is setting up a library of parts.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |