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Cedar Rapids, Iowa | My first board - I needed a circuit that was complicated enough that it would be ugly to make on a breadboard. They were all through-hole parts at that time. As time went on, I eventually tried some surface mount components, and they worked well. I have been progressively using smaller and smaller parts, but have found the limit of how small I want to go for hand-assembled stuff. Near the bottom of this board are three RS-232 converter chips, two are larger SOIC size, one is the TTSOP, which is small and a real pain. The contacts are so close together that the odds of a solder bridge are pretty high.
The card I'm programming with comes with a development kit that includes a break out board so you can access all the pins on a standard 0.1" header, but you often still need to add components somewhere to be able to do things. For example, the card has 8 serial ports, but 6 of them are only TTL voltage level outputs. So you need to add converter chips to get to RS-232 if you want to use them with RS-232 devices. It was easier to just make a board that has everything on it, plus I was able to test some other things that I hadn't done before.
The PCB layout software I'm using is Eagle. I learned how to use it by reading tutorials and watching a few youtube videos. | |
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Building a circuit board (with pictures)
