Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: Homebrew PCBs

So, now I have a nice ground plane and isolated traces on my bottom side.
Alas, all is not perfectly well. These unplated through-holes really suck. I
got clever and stuck SMT on the top, and through hole parts on the bottom,
so everything could be soldered from just on top. The only headache was
manually inserting a via where Eagle's autorouter would want to just use the
component lead for a via. Some things, like RJ45 jacks, just can't be
soldered from underneath. It wouldn't be so bad if Eagle didn't think itself
smarter than you. You can't manually route a completely routed signal. I
think it picks eligible signals from its ratsnest list. On a completely
routed board, the list is empty. So you can't manually route a completely
routed signal, and you can't ripup a thermal. I had to ripup the entire GND
and reroute it all. It's not as bad as it might sound. You just have to know
to do so. Autoroute restored it well enough that I can't see any difference,
except for the one via and trace I added so it can be soldered from on top.)