Homebrew_PCBs

Hi everyone,

I don't know if this has been already posted, but I thought it might be helpful to anyone who just wants to whip out a quick board without paying a premium in materials.

I used to use the old rub on transfer method of etching, but if anyone has tried to find those today they're pretty much impossible. I was told the one place that made these stopped a while ago and so now the options are limited to toner transfer or some sort of light based photo process. Either way, you usually need some sort of PCB layout application to make your board and these can be pricey. I use a Macintosh and a lot of those applications are only made for Wintel.

Hey, I'm old school. I just want to whip out a board every now and then without making it a big production. What I did was scan an old rub on transfer template and then using Photoshop I created a circuit by cutting, pasting, flattening and repeating that process. It worked! All I had to do then was print it on to some Press-n-Peel and I was good to go.

I published the scan of the rub on transfer template along with some documentation about the process. Anyone should be able to use this method to make a board. You don't need Photoshop. I found you can open the template with Gimp (open source) and even NeoOffice (also open source). If anyone is interested here's the link to the files:

http://web.me.com/mackmike/macmike.net/Electronics.html

Let me know if anyone finds this useful. I'd be interested in hearing about how this worked for you.

"macmyke01" <michael.scarborough1@...> writes:

> Either way, you usually need some sort of PCB layout application to
> make your board and these can be pricey. I use a Macintosh and a lot
> of those applications are only made for Wintel.

gEDA/PCB work just fine on Mac OS/X, and they're free.

> Hey, I'm old school. I just want to whip out a board every now and
> then without making it a big production.

You can use PCB without gEDA for that :-)

On 01/06/2009, at 11:58 AM, DJ Delorie wrote:

> "macmyke01" <michael.scarborough1@...> writes:
> > Either way, you usually need some sort of PCB layout application to
> > make your board and these can be pricey. I use a Macintosh and a lot
> > of those applications are only made for Wintel.
>
> gEDA/PCB work just fine on Mac OS/X, and they're free.
>

He's right (except for the slash in OS X, that's a bit IBM ;-) ),
EAGLE lite is also free for noncommercial use and runs very well on OS
X (like all CAD software on all platforms, normal key shortcuts and
scroll wheel behaviour do not apply). There's no quick way of making
just a board without a schematic, but I thought I'd point out your CAD
choices are not as bad as they were under OS 9

PG

Piers Goodhew <piers@...> writes:

> There's no quick way of making just a board without a schematic,

One of the weird things about PCB is that it was designed BEFORE the
schematic capture stuff (way before, IIRC). It has its own way of
entering the rats nest, library parts, etc[*] for people who want to
do a board without schematics.

Yeah, the switch to a BSD base for OS X opened them up to a lot of
unix-y software. A couple of the guys in our core group use Macs for
geda work, now that a lot more stuff "just works".

[*] Although most people use the gschem->pcb flow, which does that for
you.