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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.
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.
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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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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
Shocking.
The reaction was worse than when Kirk told the Star Trek fans to get a life.
Shatner surely. It would all be a bit meta for James Kirk to decry Star Trek fans.
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
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
.
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?
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).
See that "Preview" button?
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.
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.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Making your own circuitboards is almost never the best option. But making your own cloth with a hand loom is almost never the best option either, and people do that for fun all the time. If you're taking advice from a Hackaday author, you're probably a hobbyist, and you can hobby however you want to.
I don't do much of this anymore, but I have designed hundreds of commercial boards and likely into the thousands of prototypes.
In the late 90's people used routers and crude lithographic techniques; these got better, but the online services scale nicely, and if you add up all the costs, it's almost insane to try and do it yourself. Why?
For entertainment purposes - that's different - but there hasn't been a commercial case for some time.
In fact, they're so cheap now, what hands on work I do, I just spin a PCB even for prototype purposes.
..don't panic