Fingers crossed

[johnridley]

I did some final, niggling touch-up on the CAD files for the 2011 Duckon blinkie tonight. It's the first board I've ever sent out to have made, and the first board I've designed using CAD - in fact the first time I've used CAD for anything. I was pleasantly surprised at how trivial EagleCAD is to learn, and how pretty much impossible to screw up it makes board layout.

I've been through a bunch of tutorials on EagleCAD and been through design rule checks a dozen times and have everything cleaned up. It's a dirt simple board, but I'm nervous I've screwed something up. But I have a friend from work who's done boards before and he's looked at the Gerber files and assures me that it looks fine, and the prototype that I etched myself works fine.

I sent him a final copy, incorporating the last few nits that he had to pick, and assuming he doesn't come up with any show-stoppers, tomorrow I should be sending the files off to China to have the boards made. With luck there will be show-off boards at Capricon.

I guess I'd better get on eBay and order a whole crapload of LEDs now. And plastic bags to bag up the kits. Then at some point I'm going to have to write assembly instructions, but this is a damned simple blinkie so that should be easy enough.

Comments

[kevinnickerson.livejournal.com]

I've never been able to get an Eagle Cad board to pass the design rules. The pads for a simple DIP always violate the spacing rules. Happily, I've not tried to send one out, this is just the way I layout the ones I make at home.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I used SparkFun's library as a starting point. Per advice from several people, I move every single part that I use to my own library, so my designs are safe against other libraries changing.

The sparkfun parts were PRETTY good, but they had overlap between the top silk layer and the solder mask stop, so I went in and made the lines avoid the pads.

I also created my own battery holder layout that has pads that will accept two different common types of battery holder, and I used a switch layout that will also take multiple types of switch.

Having hand-routed things with pencil and paper in the past, it was an unmitigated joy to use EagleCAD to route things. So easy to lay things down, rip them up, move them around, etc.

I did have a few design rule hits on the final copy, but it was just overlapping pads on the battery holder, which is OK, and a teeny tiny overlap between a solder mask stop and a silkscreen layer that I don't really care about.

I just learned about View/Info tonight, I'm glad I did before sending the thing out, it allowed me to get a few things EXACTLY right.

I had to make my own CAM job too. I started from SparkFun's CAM, but they weren't generating Gerber files for the dimension or the milling layer. Trivial changes but they were things I needed.

I probably have spent about 30 hours learning the tools, programming, prototyping and everything so far. I think I could do the whole thing in probably 15 hours next time, though of course the next one could be more complex.

I'm kind of leaning towards different rather than complex though. Complex blinkies are kind of interesting, but I don't think they should be the main thrust of the DIY blinkie room. I think most people just want to have something that's kind of neat that they built themselves, it doesn't have to have 1000 LEDs on it.