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Does It Make Sense To Hand Make Printed Circuit Boards?
An anonymous reader writes: A Hackaday author told the hackers that it isn't worth making your own PC boards anymore. Good tools, fast shipping, and cheap manufacturing capacity means that spending a day making a board that is much worse than a 'pro' board just isn't worthwhile anymore. The reaction was worse than when Kirk told the Star Trek fans to get a life. Although there have been some who agree, many of the readers have taken it as an affront to their very way of life.
Nope, not worth it by a long shot.
It's fun to try If you want to understand the PCB etch process, or if you absolutely need a PCB right away.
But the results are quite frankly terrible compared to paying $10 for 5 boards from china.
The main issues with home made PCBs is
- Drilling the holes dead center
- No plated through holes.
- 2 layers can be a bitch to align
- No solder mask.
- Side etching of the thin tracks.
- The many many hours of time it takes verses just paying the $10 and waiting 2 weeks.
Breadboarding works for hole-mounted stuff. I haven't done that in 10 years. I need a PCB within an hour so that I can build two or three prototypes within a day.
Then you want these.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
a good modern alternative to wire wrap for SMD components :
http://elm-chan.org/docs/wire/...
Used that for some very fine pitch, nice results for one-offs.
I recommend experimenting with different wire thickness and insulations (some enameling is made to be burned off when soldering, and there's an optimal diameter around 0,3mm)
aaaaaaa
If you're prototyping, why in hell not use "hole-mounted stuff"?
Many modern ICs are only available in SM packaging.
In the time it takes you to solder on two or three surface mount components, you can have the whole circuit breadboarded up and smoke flying.
No. Get some solder paste, and a reflow oven (a $29 toaster oven from Walmart works fine). Surface mount is much faster than through-hole because you you just place the parts on the board with tweezers and pop it in the oven.
Also these, from Adafruit. Depending on the size, they only cost about $1 apiece. That's expensive for production but, if your time is worth anything to you, is well worth it for prototyping.