PCB Programs?

[Pavan Dave]

What programs does your team use to make PCBs?

EDIT: Sorry I was a bit rushed.... Anyways I am wondering what programs your teams use to make PCBs and design your custom circuits. I am also wondering where you send your boards to as well. Approximately how much does your team invest in PCBs?

[Qbranch]

Well, your best free option is probably PCBartist (click to download, free, unlimited license) which allows you to lay out your PC board, then either save your gerber files or submit directly to AdvancedCircuits... one of the many quick-turn boardhouses in the US now.

If you want another option for a board manufacturer, we've also had fantastic success with PCBexpress.

Questions? Post. Hope that helps.

-q

[Phil Mack]

Our team doesn't use any circuit boards. Every signal carrying wire connects a device directly to the RC. And the rules in the past were very clear about high current wiring.

But back in college, the most popular company for that kind of thing was http://www.pad2pad.com. They provide software that can give you quotes as you design. They are reasonably priced for low quantity pcb production runs, but the price totally depends on what you are looking for: how many layers you need, and whether or not you need solder masking. Most of the people I knew would spend around $200 or $300 for boards for senior capstone projects, but that includes extras, which lower the average cost of each individual board considerably. So price is extremely dependent on what you have designed.

Customs PCBs can certainly save a lot of time and reduce points of failure. And they make a project look more professional.
Good luck,
~Phil

[EricVanWyk]

Wow, I didn't realize teams were making their own PCBs.

Do you have a feel for how many teams do this, and what type of boards they make?

I'm an electrical engineer, so I'm designing circuits all day.

[Richard McClellan]

I haven't been on a FIRST team that makes their own PCBs before, though that would be pretty cool. As an engineering student at UT, we use Eagle for PCB design. It's free and easy to use, and outputs standard gerber files that can be sent to PCBExpress and manufactured for $33/board. The boards usually come with free popcorn and coupons for a free large dominos pizza, so it's a great deal. (I guess they know robotics nerds like pizza)

[BrianBSL]

190 hasn't produced a PCB since the pbasic days and the INS...

However, on other projects, I've had pretty good luck with the freeware Eagle software, although it does have some limitations in the freeware version. I've also done Ultiboard (part of NI's (formally EB's) Multisim), and wasn't totally impressed with it (school had a license).

In my former jobs (I now do software, at least for the time being) we've used Orcard w/ Allegro, Mentor Design Architect w/ Board Architect (ick, stay away), and Mentor DxDesigner w/ Expedition PCB (formally Viewdraw). The DxDesigner set is by far the best I've used and I would encourage you to learn it if you ever have a chance to (ie, access to a PC with it installed).

[Pavan Dave]

I've [unfortunately] used Mutlisim and Ultiboard through school because that is what our school district has a license for. I have also fiddled with Eagle at home too but not enough yet maybe less than an hour total but I plan on becoming much more used to Eagle as I am sure that not every team I [hopefully] will mentor, might not have access to it.

For our robotics though we use OrCAD because our mentors use it and we have access to it on site at NASA.

[yongkimleng]

If anyone has access to Protel DXP.. I'd say its an excellent PCB design tool

[Dave Flowerday]

All of the boards we've produced over the last several years have been done with FreePCB. To be honest I don't have a lot of experience with other packages - I've tried Eagle but never quite got used to it, messed around with KiCAD a bit, etc. but I always end up back at FreePCB. (I never got to the point where I felt the need to buy a commercial package - our projects are small and there's enough free software out there to get the job done). As an added bonus, the author is apparently involved in FIRST.

For board manufacturing, I've used www.apcircuits.com, www.pcbfabexpress.com, www.batchpcb.com, and ordered full panels from www.goldphoenixpcb.biz. That last one is a board house in China (it's the same one used by www.batchpcb.com), but you'll have your boards in 7-10 days after ordering. You'll get a lot of boards because they make a whole panel, but often the cost of the full panel from them is about the same as getting a few prototypes made at the other places. I've had very good results from all of these places - the differences are mainly in pricing versus leadtime. APCircuits is great if you need the boards fast - if you don't need soldermasks they'll ship the next day for a reasonable cost. PCBFabExpress is what I used when I needed a small quantity (2-4) boards with soldermask with a short turnaround time. BatchPCB is excellent if you're not under a time crunch (order to delivery can be 4+ weeks), and GoldPhoenix is what I've used whenever I know I'll need more than just a couple boards because the cost difference is low. Also, be advised that GoldPhoenix sometimes runs specials on eBay.

There's a (somewhat lousy) picture of one of the boards we did last year in this post. We designed those with FreePCB and had them made at Gold Phoenix (along with our custom circuit board that was used on the robot).

[dtengineering]

I've used Eagle before. It takes a bit of getting used to, and the parts library isn't quite as easy to use as I would like, but once you get it all set up it does autorouting quite nicely... but it is FREE.

The size of the PCB board is limited in the free version, but for simple circuits that has not been an issue.

Jason

P.S. I like the links provided here... I might check some of them out to see if they are easier for my students to use.

[Ken Leedle]

I have used Eagle for a few PCBs. The autorouter works okay for small boards or if you don't care about having lots of vias. You can usually do better manually. I have also done a few boards in AutoCad- but I would not recommend it. It makes it so much faster when you have a library of components to select from.

As for making the PCBs, I would highly recommend manufacturing them yourself. All you need to do is get some special toner transfer paper (high gloss photo paper will work), an iron, a copper clad board, and ferric chloride or other etching solution. You print the mirror image of your design onto the toner transfer paper in a laser printer and iron it onto the board. The plastic in the toner sticks to the copper. Then you submerge your board in the etching solution and everything that isn't covered with toner will be etched away. I have made about 20 PCBs with this method and it works very well. The resulting traces aren't as clean as a professionally made board, but they are fine for most applications. I have used this successfully with 80 pin TQFPs (like the PIC in the robot controller) and other surface mount components. You can get boards and etching solution from Radioshack or other sources. A small to medium size board can be completed in just a few hours and it is pretty fun. A pretty good website describing this method is:
http://www.fullnet.com/~tomg/gooteepc.htm

-Ken

[Sparks333]

Our team has designed co-processors for smart sensors in the past, and most of our boards come through expressPCB . They have a proprietary board design software application that is pretty good, and decent libraries - the only downside I've found is no autorouting, but most free autorouting applications I've used are horrible. One of the great things about expressPCB is the miniboard option - you can get three 2-layer 3.8" x 2.5" PCBs for around $50, sans silk screen and with a limited number of vias and holes. Most of our boards were considerably smaller than that, so we often shoehorned 2 or 3 separate circuits onto the surface provided. Great stuff.
Their schematic linking program is nothing special, but works well with the layout program. Pretty much, having used PCB123 and PCBexpress, I can safely say that I prefer expressPCB.

[DonRotolo]

Mostly we use Eagle, 'cause it's free (as dtengineering noted). For small boards, we etch them ourselves and use the CNC PC Board Drill machine to drill them, and for larger ones we use a commercial PC Board service such as those Dave Flowerday mentioned, and who advertise regularly in Nuts & Volts (which is part of the KOP!).

Don

[www.divsys.com]

We use ORCARD for our layout here at dsi.

Several folks in the FIRST community are familiar with us. We are a PCB, PCBA and turn key contract manufactuer. All design, boards and assembly are done under one roof. We are one of only 3 like us in the world.

www.divsys.com Please let me know if we can ever be of help.

thanks,
Ben Wrightsman

[BQuennell]

In the past we've gone quite low-tech and just used Microsoft Paint to draw up the boards, we do have an etcher though so it makes life easy for the electronics guys and they just produce them on their own.