very cool project site

[Louis Mamakos]

The OSH Park site, in addition to selling PCBs that others 
have designed, is also a fabricator for low-volume PCB designs
of your own.  You can use various PCB CAD programs that produce
gerber files, submit them, and get back 3 copies of your board
in a couple of weeks.  The guy running the site will aggregate
your board and a bunch of other designs submitted, panelize them
all and then has them fabricated by a PCB house based in the
US.  The quality is high, and better than the quick-turn
PCB fabricators in China, with the price in the same ballpark.

I've used them for this purpose myself, and the results are
very high quality.  (That is, assuming, your gerber files
are "correct" -- garbage in, garbage out!)  You get double
sided boards, with ENIG finishing (gold plated PCB lands)
and pretty impressive 6mil minimum trace with/spacing 
design rules.  Silk screen and solder resist top and bottom
standard.  The deep purple PCB color is a distinctive sign
of an OSH Park produced board.

Basically $5 per square inch and you get 3 copies of your
board.

After doing one of these boards myself, using the free
Eagle CAD for schematic capture, autorouting and layout,
the mystery and fear of doing SMD designs is largely gone.
Assembly goes as fast as doing through-hole parts, and I
used 0805 and a few 0603 sized components that was able
to place and solder by hand.

louie
wa3ymh



On Jan 15, 2013, at 3:27 PM, Mike O'Dell <mo at ccr.org> wrote:

> http://spacetimepro.blogspot.com/
> 
> the board fab that he references to buy the board
> has a CATALOG section listing all the other project
> boards they have on sale with references back to
> the original article, and several are also quite
> interesting. seems there is a veritable flood
> of gimcracks and gizzeroos for the Raspberry Pi.
> 
> enjoy!
> 
>    -mo
> 
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