Electronics prototyping is an important part of electronics device development. Prototyping means to build and test an early version of) an electronic circuit. Prototyping your product is all about learning. Each time you create a prototype version you will, or should, learn something new. Start with the most simple, low cost way to prototype your product. This posting gives you overview to different ways to build and prototype electronics circuits.
This video reviews several of the electronic circuit prototyping techniques. It is a good overview if many different techniques.
Electronics on the Floor: Five reasons not to use printed circuit boards for projects
How you begin prototyping your product’s electronics depends on what questions you are trying to answer.
If you have broad questions about whether your product will even work, or whether it will solve the intended problem, then you may be wise to begin with an early works-like prototype based on a development kit such as an Arduino or Raspberry Pi. Then wire some external functionality like sensors to it with jumper wires and/or add-on boards as needed.
If there are no big questions about your product’s functionality then for professional electronics design you should probably move right to designing a custom PCB. Most large companies developing products begin with a custom PCB. This is the fastest route to market, although not likely the cheapest. If you are an electronics hobbyist or need to build one-off device for a specific use quickly, then some other methods might be more suitable.
Alligator clip test cables
Wires with alligator clips are useful in electronics lab for making temporary connections. Those alligator wires can be used to make simple temporary circuits when you need to connect just few components together.
Alligator Clips Electrical DIY Test Leads
Alligator Clips – Electrical Tutorial – HWFCI
How sucks the cheap alligator clip compared with the 10 times price one
Hook Test Leads vs Alligator Clip
Jumper wires
Dupont type jumper wires are extremely handy components to have on hand, especially when prototyping with a development kit such as an Arduino or Raspberry Pi. Jumper wires are simply wires that have connector pins at each end, allowing them to be used to connect two points to each other without soldering. You can use them to connect easily development kit boards together, to breadboard or to sensors.
#12 Five Tricks for working with Dupont wires
Arduino Prototyping Basics #17: Jumper Wires
Arduino prototyping basics Using jumper wires 3/8
Breadboard
Many electronics projects use something called a breadboard. A breadboard is a rectangular plastic board with a bunch of tiny holes in it. These holes let you easily insert electronic components to prototype. It is easy to push in wired component and it is easy to remove a component if you make a mistake, or just start over and do a new project. The term breadboard comes from the early days of electronics, when people would literally drive nails or screws into wooden boards on which they cut bread in order to connect their circuits. Luckily today there are better options. Modern breadboards are made from plastic, and come in all shapes, sizes, and even different colors. Read How to Use a Breadboard for more information.
How to Use a Breadboard
Cutting Perfect Jumper Wires (for breadboard)
Point to point wiring
Point-to-point or hand wiring is traced back to the time when electrical assemblies employed wire nuts or screws to hold wires to an insulated ceramic or wooden board. The modern version of point-to-point construction uses tag boards or terminal strips. It involves soldering components to the electrical assembly.
Point-to-point circuit board wiring is ideal when building a prototype or a customized, one-of-a-kind board. Point-to-point circuit board, which in essence is a hand-wired board. It has low capacitance between conductors since the connections are separated by air. Point to point wiring can be seen typically on tube amplifiers and simple DIY circuits.
Dead bug prototyping
Dead bug prototyping is a way of building working electronic circuits, by soldering the parts directly together, or through wires instead of the traditional way of using a printed circuit board (PCB.) This type of circuit is often a quick way to get going on a project, and is a good way to test stuff, before investing in printed circuit boards. You are often making interesting looking 3D circuits, rather than 2D circuits.
Freeform circuits
Freeform electronics are a way of building working electronic circuits, by soldering the parts directly together, or through wires instead of the traditional way of using a printed circuit board (PCB.) You are often making interesting looking 3D circuits, rather than 2D circuits.
What is a freeform circuit sculpture? It is the art of creating a sculpture from electrical components using brass rods or wire to build the circuit into form. This is an aesthetically pleasing and highly compelling practice that typically doesn’t include circuit boards or enclosures, although they are sometimes still used. Web pages Dead Bug Prototyping and Freeform Electronics and Twelve Circuit Sculptures We Can’t Stop Looking At have nice looking artistic examples of this kind of circuits.
Freeform Circuitry // #TBT
Veroboard
Veroboard is a brand of stripboard, a pre-formed circuit board material of copper strips on an insulating bonded paper board which was originated and developed in the early 1960s. It was introduced as a general-purpose material for use in constructing electronic circuits and is very useful for constructing small to medium size prototype circuits. The generic terms ‘veroboard’ and ‘stripboard’ are now taken to be synonymous. In using Veroboard, components are suitably positioned and soldered to the conductors to form the required circuit. Breaks can be made in the tracks and jumper wires are added as needed. The versatility of the veroboard/stripboard type of product is demonstrated by the large number of design examples that can be found on the Internet.[
Circuit Board Prototyping: Breadboards, Padboards, Stripboards and More
Manhattan style circuit construction
“Manhattan Style” is a technique for constructing electronic circuits by gluing pads or traces to make “islands” of separate conductivity on top of a base material. The “Manhattan style” is a very old method of circuit construction. It’s especially popular among radio amateurs for high frequency circuits because it has a solid ground plane that helps to reduce interference and noise. To build Manhattan style you need a copper clad board (one-sided is OK). The first step is to make small cutouts in the copper for the component pads and cut the board to a good size. Some builders do not make cutouts, but glue small pieces of circuit boards on the copper to get “isolated islands”. Cut out small pieces of copperboard (from another piece of board) and glue them onto the main copperboard to serve as component mounting platforms.
Extreme prototype board wiring techniques
Printed circuit boards
Printed circuit boards are the norm in most modern electronic products. A printed circuit board electrically connects, through mechanical support, electronic components through the use of conductive tracks or pads etched from sheets of copper that are laminated into a non-conductive substrate. Electrical components, such as capacitors and resistors, are then soldered onto the printed circuit board. Typically printed circuit boards are designed with PCB design software and manufactured by circuit board manufacturing companies. But it is also possible to make your own circuit boards.
Making of PCBs at home, DIY using inexpenive materials
DIY PCB Toner Transfer (No Heat) & Etching
343 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
Designing Electronics That Work
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/15/designing-electronics-that-work/
[Hunter Scott] who has graced these pages a fair few times, has been working on electronics startups for the past ten years or so, and has picked up a fair bit of experience with designing and building hardware. Those of us in this business seem to learn the same lessons, quite often the hard way; we call it experience. Wouldn’t it be nice to get up that learning curve a little quicker, get our hardware out there working sooner with less pain, due to not falling into the same old traps those before us already know about? The problem with the less experienced engineer is not their lack of talent, how quickly they can learn, nor how much work they can get done in a day, but simply that they don’t know what they don’t know. There’s no shame in that, it’s just a fact of life. [Hunter] presents for us, the Guide to Designing Electronics that Work.
Designing Electronics that Work
http://designingelectronics.com/
Over 300 pages of practical, hard-to-find information that’s missing from other electronics books
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/09/streamline-your-smd-assembly-process-with-3d-printed-jigs/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tricked-Out Breadboard Automatically Draws Schematics Of Whatever You Build
https://hackaday.com/2021/12/06/tricked-out-breadboard-automatically-draws-schematics-of-whatever-you-build/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Secret Ingredient For 3D-Printed Circuit Traces: Electroplating
https://hackaday.com/2021/12/06/secret-ingredient-for-3d-printed-circuit-traces-electroplating/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Made To Spec: The Coming Age Of Prototyping As A Service
https://hackaday.com/2021/12/08/made-to-spec-the-coming-age-of-prototyping-as-a-service/
In the last decade, the price for making a single PCB plummeted. And we’ve featured tons of hacks with boards hailing from places like OSH Park or Seeed Studio. But this phenomenon isn’t isolated, and all sorts of one-off prototyping services are becoming cheaper and looking to satiate both hobbyist and engineer alike.
Today, I want to blow the lid off a few places offering one-off mechanical prototyping services. I’ll take us through some history of how we got here, introduce a few new players, and finally highlight some important tradeoffs before you start ordering bespoke aluminum parts straight to your doorstep.
Now go get your ANSI Z87+ safety glasses, and let’s get started.
Our PCB Origins
Just over a decade ago, ordering Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) was an expensive (nay, too expensive) ordeal for the hobbyist. Getting a single board made would cost you several hundred US dollars at the PCB fab house. The issue wasn’t the price per board. It was the up-front manufacturing cost to push the board through the factory. Sadly, PCBs just aren’t made one-at-a-time. They’re consolidated with other copies of the same PCB onto a larger panel to simplify the fixturing process when moving the design from machine to machine in manufacturing.
But soon after, a small company called OSH Park did something wildly different. Acting as middle-agent, they consolidated different PCBs from various designers onto a shared panel and sent that panel design out for manufacturing instead. The result was that hobbyists could order a single PCB through OSH Park for a fraction of the cost of needing to place a batch order directly. And what was once a professional process became available to the after-hours engineer for a few dollars and a few weeks lead time.
In the years that followed, other manufacturers caught on, especially in China. And it seemed like a race-to-the-bottom to offer the cheapest single-quantity circuit board. For the first time, electronics hobbyists on a budget were able to use the same manufacturing processes as the professionals. Now, names like JLCPCB, Dirty PCBs, Seeed Studio, and PCBWay are pretty common among this community of hackers.
Prototyping as a Service
Many of us know the story above. Heck; we lived through it! But it doesn’t stop there. In fact, something similar is happening in other domains. Other manufacturing services are opening their doors to one-off prototypes that used to require higher minimum orders, and the result is that your nearest hackerspace could be entirely virtual where parts get ordered and delivered to your doorstep.
It’s worth asking: where is this happening? Right now, we’re seeing these options emerge from 2D computer-controlled manufacturing processes like laser cutting, water jetting, and 2D CNC routing. The common theme? Each of these processes uses tools that operate on big sheets of stock material. The upshot is that, with some upstream pre-processing, batches of orders can be consolidated onto the same sheet — just like OSH Park did. In theory, this trick could extend to any manufacturing process where software can glue together aggregate orders into a batch process.
Right now, batching orders onto sheets of shared stock material makes a lot of sense. But, with some work, it’s possible to extend this concept to other processes. In the meantime, it’s time to take advantage of the added process capabilities that can be delivered to our doorstep for a fraction of their original price.
The Players
Let’s take a quick tour of who’s delivering manufactured singles straight to your doorstep. I imagine that our readers will be familiar with Shapeways for SLS 3D printing and Ponoko for laser cutting, so I’ll sidestep them to highlight some other up-and-coming offerings.
Laser-Cutting: SendCutSend
Carbon Fiber CNC Routing: CNCMadness
Resin 3D Printing: PCBWay
Low Volume Injection Molding from IGUS
Make-it-Quick Tradeoffs
Just like OSH Park, the services above make some sacrifices for promising those fast economic part offerings. But, of course, in plenty of cases, those tradeoffs don’t matter. Nevertheless, it’s worth being explicit about the three options that get sacrificed: design inspection, specifications and tolerances.
Design Inspection
First off, we lose design inspection. With expensive manufacturing services, humans will often inspect your order to make sure what you’re about to have them make is free of glaring errors.
Specialty Specifications
At the price of speed, these services sacrifice specifications. That is, we don’t get all the options available to us that we would otherwise get when quoting with a more traditional machine shop. Among these sacrifices, we lose out on specialty materials, surface finishes, coatings, heat treatments, and other post-processing tasks like deburring sharp edges.
Tolerances
Finally, we have tradeoffs in dimensional tolerances. This one is by far the most important tradeoff to consider. The sad reality about machined parts is that they’ll never be the exact dimensions that our file specifies. As designers, we need to design for this quirk, making sure our design works over a small range of size deviations called dimensional tolerances.
With a high-end machine shop, dimensional tolerances are just specs. You can specify how exact the part dimensions need to be, and the shop will try to make the part within those tolerances, increasing the price for tighter specs. But with these low-cost services, we don’t get to specify how exact our part dimensions will be. Instead, they will either list fairly coarse tolerances up-front, or won’t list any manufacturing tolerances altogether.
Where We Came From; Where We’re Going
About a decade ago, it seemed like understanding the dirty process of etching PCBs in your garage with nasty chemicals would make you the coolest hacker on the block. But nowadays the dirtiest part of the craft of circuit board making has been replaced with an ordering process that’s too convenient to overlook. What may have been garage sorcery has been reduced to a few clicks away. But the result has been an explosion of hardware projects that all rely on what used to be an either commercial or boutique process for those with money or patience.
It’s worth asking: how is our relationship to hardware design going to change as we start to leverage these services for our after-hours hobbyist projects? I’d say that, just like OSH Park did, these mechanical prototyping services open up new doors to the complexity of the projects we can make at home. Now we need not rely on strictly 3D printed parts. We can work in metal sheets too! And with added complexity comes a proliferation of new ideas that I hope to read about here.
But something is lost. And that’s my intimate relationship spent working with the raw materials themselves. There’s something quite soothing about that sweaty machine shop ritual of leaning over your part while chips fly off into the corner. But not all projects need to undergo this ritual to have meaning. And since these new services only continue to multiply the effect of my project efforts, you can bet I’ll keep using them.
Tomi Engdahl says:
BEAM Bird Pendant Really Chirps
https://hackaday.com/2021/12/09/beam-bird-pendant-really-chirps/
[NanoRobotGeek] had a single glorious weekend between the end of the term and the start of exams. Did they buy a keg and party it up? No, in fact, quite the opposite — they probably gained a few brain cells by free-form soldering this beautiful chirping bird pendant at 0603 instead.
The circuit is a standard BEAM project built around a 74HC14, but [NanoRobotGeek] made a few changes to achieve the ideal chirp sound. As you can see in the video after the break, it chirps for around 30 seconds and then shuts off for 1-2 minutes before starting up again.
Free-Formed Solar Chirping Bird Pendant Using 0603 SMD Components (BEAM Electronics)
https://www.instructables.com/Free-Formed-Solar-Chirping-Bird-Pendant-Using-0603/
The final circuit chirps on and off for about 20-40 seconds (watch the video to hear it chirping) and then stays off for another 1-2 minutes before chirping again.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2021/12/10/ninja-art-pcb-nightlight-jutsu/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lasers Make PCBs The Old Fashioned Way
https://hackaday.com/2021/12/10/lasers-make-pcbs-the-old-fashioned-way/
There are many ways to create printed circuit boards, but one of the more traditional ways involves using boards coated with photoresist and exposing the desired artwork on the board, usually with UV light. Then you develop the board like a photograph and etch it in acid. Where the photoresist stays, you’ll wind up with copper traces. Hackers have used lots of methods to get that artwork ranging from pen plotters to laser printers, but commercially a machine called a photoplotter created the artwork using a light and a piece of film. [JGJMatt] sort of rediscovered this idea by realizing that a cheap laser engraver could directly draw on the photoresist.
https://www.instructables.com/Create-High-Quality-PCBs-at-Home-With-Cheap-Laser-/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Snip Your Way To DIY PCB Castellations
https://hackaday.com/2021/12/11/snip-your-way-to-diy-pcb-castellations/
Castellated PCB edges are kind of magical. The plated semicircular features are a way to make a solid, low-profile connection from one board to another, and the way solder flows into them is deeply satisfying. But adding them to a PCB design isn’t always cheap. No worries there — you can make your own castellations with this quick and easy hack.
https://twitter.com/CoilProtogen/status/1466784049775751170
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2018/07/28/save-some-steps-with-this-arduino-rapid-design-board/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Has DIY Become Click And Buy?
https://hackaday.com/2021/12/11/has-diy-become-click-and-buy/
We are living in great times for DIY, although ironically some of that is because of all the steps that we don’t have to do ourselves. PCBs can be ordered out easily and inexpensively, and the mechanical parts of our projects can be ordered conveniently online, fabricated in quantity one for not much more than a song, or 3D printed at home when plastic will do. Is this really DIY if everything is being farmed out? Yes, no, and maybe.
It all depends on where you think the real value of DIY lies. Is it in the idea, the concept, the design? Or in its realization, the manufacturing? I would claim that most of the value actually lies in the former, as much as I personally enjoy the many processes of physically constructing the individual parts of many projects.
Made To Spec: The Coming Age Of Prototyping As A Service
https://hackaday.com/2021/12/08/made-to-spec-the-coming-age-of-prototyping-as-a-service/
Tomi Engdahl says:
PCB Microsurgery Puts The Bodges Inside The Board
https://hackaday.com/2021/12/14/pcb-microsurgery-puts-the-bodges-inside-the-board/
We all make mistakes, and there’s no shame in having to bodge a printed circuit board to fix a mistake. Most of us are content with cutting a trace or two with an Xacto or adding a bit of jumper wire to make the circuit work. Very few of us, however, will decide to literally do our bodges inside the PCB itself.
https://twitter.com/azonenberg/status/1469808785694683139
Tomi Engdahl says:
Using Fishing Wire To Hold In Pin Headers Is A Nifty Trick
https://hackaday.com/2021/12/16/using-fishing-wire-to-hold-in-pin-headers-is-a-nifty-trick/
Working on a breadboard, one can get used to the benefits of being able to readily plug and unplug jumper wires to reconfigure a project. One could only dream of doing so with PCBs, right? Wrong! [Stewart Russell] recently shared a tip on Twitter on how to do just that, with the help of a little fishing wire.
The trick is simple: on any old development board that uses 0.1″ pitch headers, simply weave some fishing line through the plated through-holes in the PCB. Then, regular jumper wires can be inserted just like on a breadboard. The fishing wire has just enough give to allow the jumper wires to be jammed in, holding them steady and in good contact, while still allowing them to be easily removed.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2021/12/18/a-well-documented-breadboard-computer-shows-dedication/
Tomi Engdahl says:
When Dell Built A Netbook With An X86 System-on-Module
https://hackaday.com/2021/12/18/when-dell-built-a-netbook-with-an-x86-system-on-module/
Just like with pre-touchscreen cellphones having fancy innovative features that everyone’s forgotten about, there’s areas that laptop manufacturers used to venture in but no longer dare touch. On Twitter, [Kiwa] talks a fascinating attempt by Dell to make laptops with user-replaceable CPU+RAM modules. In 2008, Dell released the Inspiron Mini 1210, with its CPU, chipset and RAM soldered to a separate board in an “extended SODIMM” form-factor – not unlike the Raspberry Pi Compute Modules pre-CM4! Apparently, different versions of such “processor cards” existed for their Inspiron Mini lineup, with varying amounts of RAM and CPU horsepower. With replacement CPU+RAM modules still being sold online, that makes these Dell netbooks to be, to our knowledge, the only x86 netbooks with upgradable CPUs.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Stencil Vacuum-Assist Helps Avoid The Heartbreak Of Smeared Solder Paste
https://hackaday.com/2021/12/22/stencil-vacuum-assist-helps-avoid-the-heartbreak-of-smeared-solder-paste/
While using a stencil should make solder paste application onto PCBs a simple affair, there are a number of “gotchas” that make it more art than science. Luckily, there are tools you can build, like this 3D-printed vacuum-assist stencil jig, that take a little of the finesse out of the process.
For those who haven’t had the pleasure, solder paste stencils are often used to make the job of applying just the right amount of solder paste onto the pads of a PCB, and only on the pads. The problem is that once the solder paste has been squeegeed through the holes in the stencil, it’s not easy to remove the stencil without smearing. [Marius Heier]’s stencil box is essentially a chamber that attaches to a shop vac, along with a two-piece perforated work surface. The center part of the top platform is fixed, while the outer section moves up and down on 3D-printed springs.
3d-printed vacuum solder stencil printer box V3
Get perfect solder stenciling every time with a few springs and some 3d-printing
https://hackaday.io/project/182116-3d-printed-vacuum-solder-stencil-printer-box-v3
Tomi Engdahl says:
UV Printing PCBs
https://hackaday.com/2021/12/28/uv-printing-pcbs/
We always enjoy [Thomas Sanladerer’s] 3D printing videos. But his latest isn’t only about 3D printing. He shows how he uses a DLP printer — which has UV light, after all — to expose PC board blanks with great results. Honestly, once we heard the idea, we immediately saw how that could work it is surprising more people aren’t taking advantage of their DLP printers like that. Of course, [Thomas] does his usual thorough treatment of the topic.
The fastest way to make crisp PCBs at home!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RudStbSApdE
Tomi Engdahl says:
You can now PRINT PCBs! Creating a homemade PCB with the Voltera V-One PCB Printer!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u4izLA-SCo
In this video I will be testing out the Voltera V-One PCB printer and create a homemade PCB version of one of my older PCB projects in order to find out whether such a PCB printer is a good replacement for proper PCB manufacturers. Along the way we will discover all the advantages and disadvantages such a printer comes with. Let’s get started!
0:00 Introduction (Why PCBs are important!)
1:17 Introducing the PCB printer
1:55 Intro
2:42 Unpacking the PCB printer
3:19 Installing the software
3:52 Deciding on an example PCB project
4:21 Drill process
5:48 Printing the top layer
7:35 Printing the bottom layer
8:04 Adding the rivets
8:25 Soldering the components
8:51 Homemade PCB of one of my older projects
10:51 Verdict of the PCB printer
Tomi Engdahl says:
PCB prototyping with UV solder-mask. High precision PCB double-sided. Chips QFN36 and ATMEGA 328P-AU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHO_rCXzI3M
Tomi Engdahl says:
PCB prototyping 0.05 mm traces/spaces . 7 segment display
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZFFfwEbqmQ
Tomi Engdahl says:
SMD Soldering Tutorial | Guide | Tools | Tecniques | Stencil
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYInlAmPnGo
In this video I show you a few tecniques for soldering SMD components. We start easy with two pins components of size 1206, 0805, 0603 and 0402. Then some SOT23 and some SOP8 and SOP16. We also solder microcontroller, QFN chip with soldering stencil and solder paste and the hot air gun.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Adam Savage’s Quick Electronics Wiring Tips!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDsVwbWiVFI
Adam introduces two simple tools to help simplify your electronics wiring projects: solder seal connectors that eliminate the need for soldering wires together, and an essential wire labeler that can spare you headaches in troubleshooting down the line. Adam used both of these tools extensively in putting together his xEMU spacesuit electronics–simple and effective is sometimes the best way to go!
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/03/the-benefits-of-critiquing-your-own-pcb-designs/
Tomi Engdahl says:
What Can You Do With a $200 CNC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1waY_yPrXnQ
3018 CNC is probably the most inexpensive machine you can buy. Surprisingly with proper settings and materials, you can achieve really nice results! Sure, it’s not the fastest CNC machine but definitely a great inexpensive learning tool for beginners.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/07/production-pcb-and-pogo-pins-produce-a-clever-test-jig/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/15/improve-your-front-panels/
Tomi Engdahl says:
1km fm transmitter circuit diagram
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb9pmaiSCng
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/20/remoticon-2021-debra-ansell-connects-pcb-in-ways-you-didnt-expect/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Make a PRINTED CIRCUIT BOARD – Mr Carlsons Lab Capacitor Tester
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4TFRvdYtVg
How to Make Double Sided Circuit Boards at Home
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=au2ba5gWLWk
Tomi Engdahl says:
Make a PRINTED CIRCUIT BOARD – Mr Carlsons Lab Capacitor Tester
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4TFRvdYtVg
How to Make Double Sided Circuit Boards at Home
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=au2ba5gWLWk
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sunday Robotics’ ProBUDDY Kits Aim to Make Prototyping Neater — Not to Mention More Portable
Pairing magnetic bases with easy-mount accessories, the ProBUDDY system makes prototypes tidier — and mountable at any angle.
https://www.hackster.io/news/sunday-robotics-probuddy-kits-aim-to-make-prototyping-neater-not-to-mention-more-portable-d42a0ed6f3d3
Tomi Engdahl says:
A Guide To Milling PCBs At Home
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/09/a-guide-to-milling-pcbs-at-home/
f you keep up with various retro vacuum tube projects, you probably have run across [UsagiElectric] aka [David]’s various PCBs that he makes on his own Bridgeport EZ-Track 3-axis milling machine — massively oversized for the job, as he puts it. In a recent video, [David] walks us through the steps of making a sample PCB, introducing the various tools and procedures of his workflow. He points out that these are the tools he uses, but the overall process should be similar no matter what tools you use.
Logisim to validate logic designs
TINA-TI, Texas Instrument’s version of the TINA SPICE simulator
DesignSpark PCB for schematic entry and PCB layout
FlatCAM, a computer-aided PCB manufacturing tool
Machining a PCB on the 3-axis CNC Bridgeport Mill
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB84_vbH_e8&t=1s
Tomi Engdahl says:
Pick And Place Hack Chat
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/07/pick-and-place-hack-chat/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/08/hair-today-gone-tomorrow-four-men-go-to-fix-a-wafer-prober/
Tomi Engdahl says:
EEVblog 1455 – Capacitors Produce Current During Reflow Soldering! WTF!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMIzsFAztv4
Electrolytic capacitors produce current when they are reflow soldered! Enough to possibly light up a high efficiency LED. What is going on?
A initial investigation with experiments and measurements.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Minamil: a minimal CNC mill – HaDPrize 2021
https://hackaday.io/project/181173-minamil-a-minimal-cnc-mill-hadprize-2021
Minamil: a minimal 3-axis CNC mill that works. Build from laser-cut hardboard with a screwdriver (mostly). Mill fine-pitch PCBs.
Designed for building your own from ready-to-assemble parts & few simple tools. Structural parts laser cut from 1/8″ (3mm) hardboard/HDF. No fabrication needed for working parts – only make a rough, loosely dimensioned frame from available material. Footprint can be smaller than a sheet of paper.
Mill 3D parts from real materials and PCBs with fine-pitch features down to limit of cutter size+runout.
Z axis clamp holds your general-purpose rotary tool.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A Guide To Milling PCBs At Home
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/09/a-guide-to-milling-pcbs-at-home/
If you keep up with various retro vacuum tube projects, you probably have run across [UsagiElectric] aka [David]’s various PCBs that he makes on his own Bridgeport EZ-Track 3-axis milling machine — massively oversized for the job, as he puts it. In a recent video, [David] walks us through the steps of making a sample PCB, introducing the various tools and procedures of his workflow. He points out that these are the tools he uses, but the overall process should be similar no matter what tools you use.
Logisim to validate logic designs
TINA-TI, Texas Instrument’s version of the TINA SPICE simulator
DesignSpark PCB for schematic entry and PCB layout
FlatCAM, a computer-aided PCB manufacturing tool
Tomi Engdahl says:
Print-a-Sketch Turns Any Surface Into A Printed Circuit Board
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/15/print-a-sketch-turns-any-surface-into-a-printed-circuit-board/
Although powerful design software and cheap manufacturing services have made rolling your own PCBs easier than ever, there are some situations where a piece of FR-4 just doesn’t cut it: think art projects with hidden LEDs or biomedical applications that need to attach to the human body. For such occasions, [Narjes Pourjafarian] and her team at Saarland University in Germany developed Print-a-Sketch: a handheld device that lets you print electric circuits on almost any surface using conductive ink.
The heart of the device is a piezoelectric print head, as used in some types of inkjet printer. It dispenses tiny droplets of silver nanoparticle ink, which is conductive enough to make useful electronic circuits by simply printing a schematic. Lines can be drawn to connect components, while customized footprints can hold LEDs, capacitors or even integrated circuits.
Print-A-Sketch: A Handheld Printer for Physical Sketching of
Circuits and Sensors on Everyday Surfaces
https://narges-pourjafarian.github.io/assets/img/Print_A_Sketch.pdf
Tomi Engdahl says:
How to Solder SMD Components using Sand
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEn3Wb_zrts
Hi Everyone, Hope you are doing great. In this video I will show you a simple trick to solder SMD Components on PCB, using sand. This trick allows us to solder small to big any size PCB within a minute.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How PCB is Made in China – PCBWay – Factory Tour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GVk_hEMjzs
A few weeks ago we have visited a PCB manufacturing company called PCBWay , this video will be all about PCB manufacturing process.I have learned a lot from them hope you also learn something.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Do PCBs Work?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9pGbLJknDk
How are PCBs made, how do they make modern electronics possible, and is it ever OK to drill through them to mount a cooler…?
Introduction to Basic Concepts in PCB Design
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESnDQl7ZM5o
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Best way to Solder? Hot Plate to the rescue! (DIY or Buy)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QarizoUnRfk
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/27/need-to-probe-circuits-remember-about-clothespins/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/thedalles77/toaster-oven-conversion-to-smd-reflow-oven-60b147
Tomi Engdahl says:
FlexyPins Might Help With Those Pesky Castellated Modules
https://hackaday.com/2022/03/07/flexypins-might-help-with-those-pesky-castellated-modules/
[SolderParty] just announced FlexyPins (Twitter, alternative view) – bent springy clips that let you connect modules with castellated pins. With such clips, you can quickly connect and disconnect any castellated module, swapping them without soldering as you’re prototyping, testing things out, or pre-flashing modules before assembly. They’re reportedly gold-plated, and a pack of ~100 will set you back 6EUR, shipping not included.
Of course, this is basically “fancy pieces of wire”, purpose-shaped, gold-plated and, hopefully, made out of material that is springy enough and doesn’t snap easily after bending a few times. We’ve seen this concept used for prototyping before, with random pieces of wire doing a pretty good job of maintaining connectivity, but these clips bring it that much closer to production-grade. It also makes us wonder – just how hard it is to solder 30-40 of them into a circuit? Do they self-align enough with the footprints given, or do you have to hold them with tweezers at a peculiar angle as you solder them? Time will tell, of course.
https://twitter.com/solderparty/status/1499441613663346689
Tomi Engdahl says:
Retro Breadboard Gives Up Its 1960s Secrets
https://hackaday.com/2022/03/13/retro-breadboard-gives-up-its-1960s-secrets/
When we see [Ken Shirriff] reverse engineering something, it tends to be on the microscopic level. His usual forte is looking at die photos of strange and obsolete chips and figuring out how they work. And while we love those efforts, it’s nice to see him in the macro world this time with a teardown and repair of a 1960s-era solderless breadboard system.
Reverse-engineering the waveform generator in a 1969 breadboard
http://www.righto.com/2022/03/reverse-engineering-waveform-generator.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-pcb-uv-project
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2022/03/21/heroic-efforts-give-smallest-arm-mcu-a-breakout-open-debugger/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.edn.com/pluggable-boards-permit-solderless-prototyping/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Make Your Own PCB Etchant
https://hackaday.io/project/19898-make-your-own-pcb-etchant
Tired of high prices? Tired of incomplete how to videos ? I was, so I decided to see if I could make an effective PCB etchant.