How To Develop a PCB on a Low Budget

by ekianjo • 12 years ago

46 16 12 years ago

unwind• 12 years ago

As a (very recent, after a loong delay) Open Pandora owner, I appreciate the skill and almost manic relentlessness that these people (especially EvilDragon) have, and that clearly goes into this project too. Good luck!

On a more technical note, it's ... fascinating with a scent of just plain scary that they're using a MIPI display. I have some experience in that field, and MIPI seems to mix with open hardware right about as well as lithium mixes with water. Have fun. :/

ZenoArrow• 12 years ago

EvilDragon is a hero among men, it's inspiring to think about all the issues he's worked so hard to overcome.

ekianjo• 12 years ago

What is your experience with MIPI exactly? what kind problems did you face?

flyinglizard3• 12 years ago

It's a closed standard and nearly impossible to debug on the physical level unless you have patience and serious equipment. While many fast buses are notoriously difficult to debug, most are pretty common and have ubiquitous tools. Not so with MIPI. Also, the specific MIPI transceiver implementations I worked with were premature crap.

pmorici2• 12 years ago

If you were hoping for tips on where to actually get a cheap PCB made check out OSH Park https://oshpark.com/ They are really good for a high quality 2 or 4 layer small run PCB. SparkFun.com used to run their own service batchpcb.com but they sold to OSH Park recently. Also if you are in Europe Fritzing Fab http://fab.fritzing.org/fritzing-fab is supposed to be pretty good.

nuriaion• 12 years ago

At work (Switzerland) we use pcb-pool.com. I think it's cheaper than Fritzing and you have more options. (Multilayer etc.)

mcescalante2• 12 years ago

+1 for OSH Park. Great quality boards, unmatchable prices, and ordering was painless.

I'd recommend using Eagle CAD and just uploading your brd files directly.

Gracana2• 12 years ago

I love OSH Park. Their boards are very high quality and their design rules allow for some small traces, spaces, annular rings, and drills. Small relative to other batch-based and small-volume services, anyway... the limits are still a little too big for properly escaping common BGA packages, which is the hurdle I'm trying to overcome right now.

mkhattab• 12 years ago

BGA packages are definitely a pain in the ass. Especially highly dense BGAs, which probably require more than 4 layers.

Assuming you have the PCB manufactured, would you assemble the components yourself? I recall being quoted higher for BGA components at a PCB assembly service because they needed to X-ray each BGA for inspection.

flyinglizard3• 12 years ago

And this is what we built so the world can get their PCB components super easily: http://www.sandsquid.com

drivers99• 12 years ago

That is really cool. I just went through an example. At first, I thought you gathered all the parts together and sent them to the users, but I guess you actually end up providing links with the orders at various sites. I don't have logins at those sites, but I'm assuming it shows up populated with the list of parts. So (assuming this is to make money), do you use referral (affiliate) codes to make money from the site?

flyinglizard3• 12 years ago

Glad you liked it! Right now we're only spending money - no revenue whatsoever. Some of the component distributors listed offered to advertise with us, but we passed (to keep Sandsquid clean and impartial).

cordite• 12 years ago

I thought it to be really cool!

At my university, we do something similar with having a core CPU board, and then another main board with all the actual components, like dials, an LCD screen, temp sensors, a speaker and so on.

This also reminds me of the whole phone blocks thing, with pluggable components.

How To Develop a PCB on a Low Budget

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