Homebrew PCBs

On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 2:26 PM, Mitch Davis <mjd@...> wrote:
>
> I check boards thoroughly and give a report on each one.

I should clarify that I check the design.  Here's a recent report for a
customer:

   - No board outline file.  Please see attached.  The purple lines should
   be a rectangle enclosing the whole board.  You can have right angle or arc
   corners.  In particular, please pay close attention to the shape of the
   board in the area of the four RJ45 connectors (or whatever they are).

   - Be aware of PCB manufacture limitations if your final board outline
   has sharp angled concave corners near the RJ45s.  It's not possible to
   faithfully reproduce sharp angled concave corners.  The mill bit is 0.8mm,
   and therefore the smallest radius of curvature of the arc you'll get on
   concave corners is 0.4mm.  Please let me know that this is ok.

   - The fab will "pull back" copper very slightly so there's no copper
   right at the very edge of the board.  There will be a very thin copperless
   margin right around the board.  If you don't want the fab to do pullback
   (for example, if your design had SMA connectors) then please tell me and
   I'll tell the fab.

   - Many packages use .dri for drill files, but Eagle wants to put drill
   holes into .txt files.  That's ok, but the files to include in your .zip
   are the .txt files.  (Also, with our .cam file, we can't find a way to stop
   Eagle from generating useless .gpi files, sigh).

   - On  the top  you have silkscreen across the pads.  What will happen is
   that the soldermask will be used to mask the silkscreen - silkcreen will be
   omitted where it crosses pads.  This is not a fatal problem, but if you're
   expecting to get back boards where the silk looks just as you designed it,
   this can be a bit of a shock.  The easiest solution to this is to redefine
   your footprints so no silk crosses the pads, but you'll still need to
   carefully review every part of your board if you want a total remedy.

   - The "XYZ" text is covering up "ABC".

   - No silkscreen on the bottom layer (that's ok, but please tell me it's
   intentional).

My chat channel is also a very good place to get a review.

Mitch.


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