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.

Comments

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't take a day to make a PCB. Show me a place where I can order a PCB and have it in my hand within an hour.

Re: Yes

[Khyber]

"If you're prototyping, why in hell not use "hole-mounted stuff"?"

Because the capacitors with the uF ratings I require are SUB MILLIMETER and SURFACE MOUNT *ONLY.*

Because the ceramic high-wattage resistors I use are SURFACE MOUNT ONLY.

Because the LEDs I use are SURFACE MOUNT ONLY.

Because you can't hole-mount a BGA package without adding in another component and thus forcing you to redo all your damned math to take into account the added resistance of a connection adapter.

Because most breadboard designs are garbage.

Because breadboards aren't made of metal like MCPCBs and are thus useless for my high-heat design work.

Because it's 2015.

Re: Yes

[Khyber]

All you need is a good printer with high-DPI for mask printing, and a proper technique that involves pre-tinning the BGA pads on the PCB, then setting your BGA part on the board and heating up the board to reflow the solder. The component will align itself without shorts due to surface tension from the solder.

I've done plenty of memory stick and GPU mounting/re-mounting work.

I work with traces in the single-digit micron range working on repairing LCD screens.

It's not that difficult.

Re: Yes

[Khyber]

"As far as I know, if you are using these SMT components, you need a SMT assembly line and oven to build you design."

No, you don't. Not even close. You can do just fine with a 600/1200w hot air gun from harbor freight and some flux-core solder from radioshack. Or you can build a wire pen for finer lead work.

And not all surface-mount stuff requires hot air reflow techniques. I can hand-solder 2mm micro-capacitors using a soldering iron with a pencil-thickness tip.

Re:Yes

[kheldan]

Been working in electronics for >30 years.

If all you need is a simple PCB (even 2-layer with plated-through holes is not that difficult) with no silkscreen or soldermask, and you're willing to have the chemicals and a PCB drill press with appropriate PCB drills on hand to do it, then it's very convenient. If you want silkscreen and soldermask, then it's going to be fairly time consuming and require quite a bit more equipment. If you need more than 2 layers, you're having a fab house do it for you, unless your need is so frequent and regularly urgent that you can justify the huge expense; at this point you are a fab house. Of course in this day and age, you can build almost anything you want and never have a single through-hole on a PCB (with the exception of vias); if it's a single-layer board then you don't even need vias in the first place and are just etching; if you're willing to put up with the relatively low-quality results, there's the toner-transfer method. As with most things it all should be dictated by need. Unfortunately governments would just as soon take everything that's not a common household chemical out of the hands of common citizens, so I'm not very surprised that there's someone trying to discourage people from manufacturing their own PCBs.

He has got some points

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, he has got some points... i too hate making my own PCBs (i'm not a young enthusiast anymore).
Most of what i make are only prototypes useful to me only and it is a huge waste of time to:
1) create the layout via software (maybe i also need to create my own components before because i can't find a library with all the ICs/components that i need)
2) go through all the lengthy steps to make a real PCB out of it
3) get rid of the chemicals once done paying attention to not ruin anything (i ruined a whole wall one day when i was a teen at my first attempts...)

There is a good, although a little bit forgot, alternative though... it is called "wire-wrapping".
Yes, it is not as beautiful as a specialized PCB, but if you have the correct wires and tools it becomes quite a fast process.
You don't need to use any software for the layout. Did you f*ck something up? No worries... just unwrap and fix the mistake! It is strong enough to be usable in real-world scenarios.

Of course, if you need to make several copies of your board... then the PCB is the way to go. But if you only need one damn copy or you are just prototyping... then wire-wrapping makes a lot of sense.

Those chemicals have never really appealed to me

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been doing electronics as a hobby for 5 years or so. I'm 27 years old so pretty much the entire time I've been interested in electronics cheap hobby PCB manufacture has been available.

For prototyping, I use breadboard. To be honest the PCB etching has never really appealed. You have to mess around with laser printing, chemical etching, drilling holes, larger track sizes and single side only unless you can do your own PTH. If it's something I really want to keep, but don't want to do a PCB I just transfer it from breadboard to this : http://www.adafruit.com/products/571

At this stage I'm designing circuits to sell with several hundred components on each, so it's easier just to design the circuit in Eagle, do the ERC and DRU checks then forget about it for two weeks while the boards are shipped from China. If I were etching this I would have to do the board layout twice and could encounter different problems on each. It saves my spare time for doing other stuff.

I think the only downside to the PCB from China method is that PCBs larger than 10x10cm become an order of magnitude more expensive. Still, it forces you to really check all your designs properly when you encounter the inevitable horror of receiving a board you designed with incorrect footprints or electrical errors.

Re:Totally not worth the trouble

[serviscope_minor]

I don't make my own PCBs. I do surface mount stuff and I like going for small sized. Lots of tiny vias, tiny component pitches, double sided, and of course a solder mask.

I know people who do make PCBs and they of course use it for big fat coarse things. You can do coarse pitch surface mount without a solder mask. That removes the need for holes, too and if you're size is large you can get away with single sided + a few jumpers too.

- Drilling the holes dead center

Etch a dot out of the middle of the pad. The drills self-align.

- No plated through holes.

Use rivets, or chemical plating:
http://www.instructables.com/i...
or electroplating:
http://www.thinktink.com/stack...

- No solder mask.

There's spray, but apparently film is easier to use:

http://www.instructables.com/i...

Here's what a home made PCB can look like if you take it to the max:

http://kavionic.com/blog/Makin...

So it's actually amazing what you can do at home, and the top-end PCB home brewers can actually produce some pretty professional PCBs. No way I'm investing the time and money into that proess though.

Re:He's right...

[Orgasmatron]

I second the toner transfer method. From the comments here, it doesn't appear to be anywhere near as popular as it should be.

It works great with through-hole and surface mount devices, it requires no more special equipment than an $8 (clothes) iron from Wal-mart, and 2-layer boards are no problem. Not exactly easy, but certainly not hard either.

If anyone is interested, buying a bag of "transistor sockets" off ebay is a good investment. They are solderable hollow tubes with a lip on one side. You press them in and solder to both layers and have a very robust via. You can solder and unsolder a leg there without disturbing your via.

To be honest, I don't do it very often any more. I think I do more PCBs by hand with a sharpie now than I do using laser toner, but that number is small too. I rarely need a board right away, and I very rarely need just one board. For me, I tend to need a half dozen of something, eventually. Like 12v battery pseudo-UPS boards for my home's Raspberry Pi sensor network, or G-M tube alarm boards for a vehicle fleet.

I tend to design the PCB directly, then build the prototype on a solderless breadboard using the netlist, feed corrections back to the design, then send it off for fabrication with oshpark.

To do that, you need a good collection of SMD to 0.1" carriers. Carriers for most packages are readily available, but I've had to make a couple myself (by drawing up the footprint and pins and sending it off for fabrication).

No.

[pz]

The beer-free tools for PCB creation have become incredibly good recently, with the exception of autorouting which is still not so great at the inexpensive end of the market.

Small-quantity PCB services are ridiculously inexpensive at often only a few dollars per board, delivered.

Component pitch has shrunk to the point that making fine lines for most chips is really hard with hobbyist etching tools. Forget vias.

So when are DIY PCBs useful? Maybe with single-sided surface mount boards that have medium-pitch components when board quality isn't so important, and you need it in hours, not days-to-weeks.

When does that happen? Never, for me. Really, never.

Add in the storage and surface areas required for the chemicals and processing, the setup/cleanup time, the toxicity of the chemicals, and there's a very good reason I have not ever, not once, even considered making my own PCB.

When I need to prototype circuits, point-to-point works really well, and using SMT adapters that are also ridiculously inexpensive. And even then, the battles you have to wage with noise coupled with the really inexpensive costs of professionally-made boards make it almost not worth constructing point-to-point (and in my experience, breadboards universally suck).

So should you make your own PCBs? If the making of the PCB isn't an end until itself for the pleasure of constructing the board, then the answer is, "no." If you like playing with resist layers, electroetch, and stuff like that, then sure. I mean, you could wind your own resistors, too, if you really wanted to. And there's a fellow who makes his own tubes, too (he's amazing, and I admire the skill). But buy your PCBs, don't make them.