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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.
Yes, most times it doesn't make sense any more to make PCBs in house.
Two exceptions : very fast manufacturing is needed, or for hobby use.
But even for hobby, it's better to wait 5-30 days and pay the few euros for the boards.
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"The reaction was worse than when Kirk told the Star Trek fans to get a life." Really? From what I can tell, it's only a small minority of the commenters who were outraged.
The rest of them seem to agree, and post their experiences with using various custom PCB services, software, etc.
How often do you need it within an hour? If you're prototyping, then breadboards are usually fine. I'm a bit surprised that this is news: it was the advice almost ten years ago last time I did anything that required producing circuit boards. If you actually need a PCB, they're cheap to get professionally made and delivery is often next-day (or longer if you want to pay even less). Only make your own if speed is far more important than quality, and your time is cheap.
Of course, that assumes that you're making a thing because you want thing. If you want to hand-print PCBs because you want to learn a craft as a hobby, then by all means, do so and have fun!
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
There is a strong sense of accomplishment if you are able to do things from scratch, or closer to scratch, where you are involved in more of the process. Saying I need a board with this spec to a vender and get an overnight shipping, vs. actually designing it yourself, printing it out.
Efficiency isn't always the goal. Efficiency is boring, because it is about standardizing the process, it is about taking joy out of learning and just focusing on mass production. Building experimenting and learning have value as well. If you make your own board you get a good feel on how things are setup and working, if there is a problem you can more easily diagnose problems, and you really learn what is happening.
Of course if your boss's Business school didn't cover Business ethics in nauseum, like mine did. that may not be the best argument. However you can bring up the efficiency of being able to print multiple per day allowing your development time to increase as you can try multiple versions per day, and the cost of man hours will be less than the cost to of the equipment.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
But he also wrote a more serious column for Car and Driver. He once talked about the decline of American motor cycle industry. Famous names like Indian Chief etc and how they all foundered. Basically they produced machines which were difficult to maintain at good condition. Every three thousand miles people had to disassemble the cylinder head and decarbonize them and reset the valves and timing etc etc. The honchos in the companies were proud their customers like to get their hands dirty, they like working on these engines. Jay Leno said, "no, we don't like messing with these engines. We want to ride and have fun. But it was impossible to get good performance without doing all these things. We were forced to do it because your engines were crappy". When Honda and Yamaha started making reliable machines that delivered good performance for long times without these messy requirements, they just ate the lunch of the old style American motorcycle manufacturers. Only Harley survived, but it was touch and go for even for them.
People like making things that work. Ages ago the only way to do it was to make your own PCB. Now a days with one day turn around, most people would like to outsource making the pcb to make sure there are no accidental contacts, no mistakenly erased and redrawn line not making full contact, making sure all the holes are drilled all the way through and there is no delamination etc. Hand made PCBs are the equivalent of your motorcycle rider decarbonizing the engine head instead of riding fast on the wide open highways of America.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
How often do you need it within an hour?
Who is the target market? Think about who they were talking to and where it was posted. This is hack-a-day. A site for people who build things often because they need something now or put together items they have at home instead of buying something from the store.
There's no doubt that a professional board house is a great thing, and I have no problem ordering something 3 weeks out for a project where I carefully build and select parts, but not all my projects were like that. Just the other day I made a board for someone who needed something the following week, except all the suitable components in my parts bin were surfacemount. I couldn't breadboard that, at least not in a way where it would last more than a few days.
The problem was not the fact that the HaD author pointed out that PCBs can be manufactured at great cost and quality. It's the elitist way the article was written telling people off for daring to hack something together themselves. "I don't make my own PCBs anymore and neither should you."
I just typed this on my Surface. I don't use a desktop or a mac and neither should you. What kind of result do you think that comment would get on Slashdot?
Making your own PCBs makes as much sense as developing your own photos ever did. People do it because they like doing it, to learn, or to mess around with the results for fun/art. No one makes their own PCBs out of necessity or efficiency.
I'm one of the people who reacted negatively to that article and you draw the entire thing in the wrong light. I don't react negatively to someone pointing out the great cost and quality of pre-fab PCB houses. I use them a lot for many projects. However I lost it when I got to the bit which said:
But I never do that anymore. It simply isn’t worth it. You shouldn’t either.
What the heck does this self-important know it all know about my projects and what I should be doing with them? He doesn't know how soon I need them, how big they are. He doesn't know if it's a 1x1" board where the cost of manufacture is dwarfed by shipping costs. He doesn't know if I live in Shenzhen right next to the manufacturer or on a small Pacific island which only gets mail every 2 months.
It is even worse considering the crowd he is pandering to. Hack a day is filled with people who do things because they need something fast, now, just something quick that will work, or need something they can make out of the crap they have lying at home because they couldn't be stuffed going to the store. He even knew this:
Don’t get me wrong. No one that reads Hackaday needs to be told why someone wants to build something even though they could buy it somewhere else. I
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There is nothing wrong with buying PCB houses if you have a project where it makes financial sense to do so and you're happy to wait 2-6 weeks to get the resulting board. I hate making circuit boards. Yet I still make them myself because the conditions of what I'm doing call for it.
By the way I am writing this from a Surface tablet. I'm not using a desktop right now, and neither should you. What would you think of a Slashdot article like that? Praise the author for his ability to chose something that suits him?
Try to do touch-related stuff on a breadboard. I dare you. Even if you do the actual sensor on a PCB, the parasitic capacity on the various wires will drive you nuts, not to mention that you have to painstakingly ensure the key wires don't run to close to each other, to cross each other and $deity help you if you should dare to move the board an inch.
Another thing you do not necessarily want to do on breadboard is some of the more timing critical SMD shit. No, breakouts are not always an option.
Considering how cheap the various parts are by now and that you can actually (some equipment, skill and training permitting) go from design to ready-to-test board in about an hour or two, depending on how complicated your design actually is, this means that yes, there IS still a reason to do your own PCBs. I prefer to test on breadboard, too. But there are a few things you simply can't do on it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They just get fewer. A decade or two ago, doing your own PCBs was pretty much a requirement if you wanted to work with PCBs and wire-wrapping or pre-made hole boards were not cutting it for you. Today, for most applications you can easily and rather cheaply buy PCBs that are usually superior in quality and also usually more likely to work as designed.
There are a few reasons I still do my own PCBs from time to time. Mind you, the applications get fewer and I think the last time I actually etched one has been at least 6 months ago.
- You wanna.
Always a good reason. You want to do it because it's for something special, maybe a gift or something where hand made from start to finish actually means something. Sentimental value and all that. Also, it's fun. At least the first couple dozen times, then it just gets boring.
- Security/secrecy reasons. ;)
There are always those designs you can't give to someone else. This is less a concern for most people, but there are applications where I certainly wouldn't want the design to go to some Chinese company before I can present it at the next Security Conference. Because I wanna make the speech.
- Time ...
Yes, overnight is possible. Expensive (around here overnight costs upwards of 50 bucks for a simple PCB), but possible. Still sometimes too slow if you need it NOW. Or if you can't wait the 4-6 weeks that the budget price could get you. Because
- Some designs can only be tested on a PCB
Especially touch designs are extremely hard to test sensibly on a breadboard because their behaviour depends highly on the layout of the PCB. Other times you're running into timing issues if you're working with very fast switching signals. Breadboards simply don't cut it with all applications you may encounter. More and more "modern" designs (wireless devices, PC components, etc) can hardly be remodeled on breadboards.
As soon as the design is done and I need a batch of PCBs, there is no question about whether I want to do them myself or whether I want them to be done by someone who can crank out a few dozen per batch. Designing can actually still mean etching your own. Not as much as it used to, but there are still applications that give you an excuse to indulge in your rubber glove fetish.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.