I’m designing a PCB to be made at home. My process is pretty basic with two sided pcb, a small cnc to drill, toner transfer and etching. I have no chemical means of doing plated vias, but have these 0.9mm rivets that I’m about to try out. Something like this: http://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/863.16/doc/tutorials/PCB_Rivets/
I have made a few simple PCB’s using this method (without the rivets) and when targeting my home process I really have to be careful about connecting the two copper layers. The default of course being that vias and plated holes are pretty much free. I have so far with my rather smallish designs gotten away with connecting the layers using THT components but I have to be careful not to depend on things like DIP IC pins to connect the two layers because it’s really really hard to solder to make sure the upper layer is connected with a DIP socket. THT resistors and caps being much easier…
Anyways, I’m just asking if someone has any tips on working with these kind of limitations? I’ve been thinking about making my own DIP footprints with only one side connected and such, but I’m not sure that’s the best way.
I’m currently doing a board with mostly SMD and just a couple of THT components. I really want to minimize the vias since that will be the most time consuming part.
I just had some success in gett freerouter.jar working (https://github.com/hedefalk/freerouting) and set a pretty high cost (50) for the vias, but I still think there should be possibilities to minimize the number further:
Another issue I don’t really understand is how to work with the copper zones and freerouting. After importing the spectra session into pcbnew I’m left with lots of isolated islands of my copper pour and need to add quite a few vias to reconnect them again:
Is there any setting in freerouting that I need to manually set? Track and via dimensions seem to be coming through from the pcbnew export but I guess there’s something missing with the copper zone clearence that’s not working out?
The Freerouting package is not part of KiCad and is not actively supported
/ developed; there were some legal issues and the original author has to cease distribution.There seem to have been some attempts to revive it but it generally seem to be an unsupported tool. The old inbuilt autorouter was removed from Kicad a while back and the main development effort in KiCad is the push and shove routing which is is very good. For these reasons, you might not get much advice here.
Yes I know that. Since this is a forum as opposed to an issue tracker I’m just thinking there might be some good know how floating around that I could suck up I’m most likely not the only one reaching for an external autorouting workflow…
Ok, looking further at this it has nothing to do with clearence, just that freerouter isn’t figuring out there are islands at all. More info here: Autorouter / copper pour inconsistency
Gonna try to disable the copper pours when autorouting.
The future was then… Riveting PCBs is an ancient (in electronics time scales) way of doing through-hole plating. I haven’t looked at a recent IPC standard for PCB manufacture, but I remember seeing QC specifications for riveting through hole boards in an (at that time old) IPC document back in the '90s.
Yeah, I don’t know why I’m tormenting myself so much when I can order 10x for 5$ from jlcpcb. Its just that I suck so bad at schematic capturing that I have these large piles of professionally manufactured but “broken by design” pcbs. Anything from upside down opamps to reversed electrolytics to thinking a 2n3904 would have the same pinout as a MMBT3904
It just feels much more fun to prototype in the garage and be sure about the design before I order from China
Oh, forgot about wrongly turned pots where CCW is max. This one had it all, reversed electrolyts, ALL pots in the wrong direction (luckily because ended up soldering all the panel pots on the other side of the board ) as well as messed up transistors (I’m now pro at soldering bent-to-fit TO-92’s on SOT-23 smd pads
In the 1950’s and 60’s those were also called “eyelets”. When manufactured correctly, a true plated-through hole is more reliable, uses less real estate on the board, and maintains a level surface across the board. On the other hand, the rivets are more durable during re-work and repair . . . . and the only way for a home constructor to get the function and performance of a plated-through hole.
I wonder if anyone still manufactures the eyelets (and associated tooling) anymore. I haven’t looked for them. I imagine it would be similar to looking for manual layout artwork and tape…
I have occasionally stumbled across PCB eyelets, and manual tooling, in recent times. They are sold for repairing boards that were damaged during repair operations. Even that application is nearing the end of its life, since the eyelets/rivets aren’t viable for anything under 0.050" (1.25mm) pitch.
The sheets of adhesive “donuts”, black tape in various widths, stick-on footprints for IC’s and transistors . . . . I think Bishop Graphics disappeared circa 1990, and I don’t remember when I last saw any of that stuff offered for sale. My last purchase would have been late 1970’s, though I worked at places that still did tape-on-mylar layouts into the mid 80’s. I have a box full of those products someplace. Probably next to the box of tube sockets.
