[EricWilliams]

Thanks for all of the information so far. I'm pretty familiar with Altium and use it quite often at work. Auto-route was summarily banned in our group, as we felt attempting to use it made meeting IPC-6011 Class 3 standards quite difficult.

My question was more about what kind of projects people have done (i.e the CAN terminator techhelpbb talked about). Maybe some utility/side projects - battery charging, cart equipment? Robot parts tend to be very application specific (if you're going to do a custom circuit, it better be) but I'd love to hear some of those ideas too.

The projects don't necessarily have to make 100% economical sense - this is a learning environment and buying something off the shelf because it's cheaper doesn't really teach you much.