If you are only looking to develop one design, your design skills are solid, and your time is precious, you are ∗much∗ better off just paying the extra $$ to have them made at a local fab with quick turn-around.
Although it is quite easy to make boards at home with modern techniques, it takes a fair bit of work to achieve anything close to what even lowest-grade commercial producer is capable of. Unless you are going to put a ∗lot∗ of time and effort into your homebrew techniques, you are going to wind up using different board layouts for those produced at home vs. those produced professionally anyway.
-p.
On Sun, Jul 20, 2014 at 6:11 PM, palciatore@... [Homebrew_PCBs] <Homebrew_PCBs@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
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> I have lurked here for a while and perhaps made one or two posts. But now is the time for action.
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> I go back a way and have made PC boards at home before, using high contrast negatives from artwork that I created. But just try to get such a negative today and even if you can, using two of them to make a double sided board is not the easiest thing. So, I must use more modern methods.
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> I am designing a board for a project and will ultimately be ordering between 50 and 350 of them in an initial order. This represents a significant expense for me and I do not want to place such an order until I am real sure that the foil is 100% OK. I can accept minor silk screen errors so that is not as important. So I need to make one or a few prototypes FROM THE VERY ARTWORK printed from the PC design program I choose. I haven't chosen it yet but am leaning toward a system called Design Spark. I haven't played with it yet, but it looks a lot like the software used by Advanced Circuits.
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> I know I can order several boards for about $65 with shipping but if there is a mistake, then I have to do it a second time and heaven forbid, a third. So am looking for a low cost method to do this at home. My time is precious, but I can spend some on this if it lowers the cost. I am looking for suggestions with specifics (like the model number of any equipment suggested) for doing this. I count expendables as project cost and equipment as capital expenses. So the equipment is easier to justify in my eyes. Sorry if I sound like a bean counter, but the equipment can be used on future projects while the expendables are gone with this one.
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