Making your printed circuit boards with PCBWay

I'm quite satisfied with the PCBs I can make at home using the toner transfer method. So far, I have made PCBs for through hole devices as well as PCBs for surface mounted devices. My results are acceptable for tracks as thin as 0.3 millimeters. But there is another issue I'm having with the toner transfer method. When I apply the iron to heat the toner, the paper warps and dilates. Not too bad though. I can still solder bigger IC capsules. But what about a double sided PCB? I found it totally impossible to align top with bottom pads across the board. Until now I tried my best to keep all designs single sided by adding wire jumpers where needed.

Yet when it comes to double sided PCBs or even more than two layer PCBs you need to get them professionally manufactured. Even with single sided PCBs when you want them to look professionally built or you need more pieces the right choice is a manufacturing service. I decided to try the PCB manufacturing services of PCBWay, a Chinese company which can manufacture PCBs and ship them worldwide at good prices.

PCBs ordered from PCBWay

Free EDA: Easy circuit board design with ExpressPCB

In the previous tutorials we simulated a circuit idea and turned it into a schematic. Now it is time to make a PCB design. I have chosen for this the free PCB design software from ExpressPCB. They also offer ExpressSCH, a schematic capture software which is quite good but doesn't have powerful drawing capabilities. This software is available only for Windows operating system but it runs in Linux too using Wine.

ExpressPCB is very easy to use and one of the features I like most is that it is very easy to make new footprints. You don't even need to leave the current PCB design window. You just draw the footprint using predefined pads and shapes then group all elements into a component footprint. That is all. If you want this to be available in other projects, you just add it to library.

There are also some downsides. The export dialog is quite limited and you can't directly export mirrored layouts. However there is a workaround that I will show you.

Free EDA: Good looking schematics using TinyCAD

Welcome to the second part of the Free EDA series. Now that we have a working circuit design, let's draw a good looking schematic. I decided to use for this the free schematic capture software called TinyCAD. It is available only for Windows but runs it Wine too.

I have chosen TinyCAD because it has quite powerful drawing abilities for a schematic capture software and I found it quite easy to make my own symbols. More than that, it can export netlists that you can use to design the PCB later (I will not be using this feature though).

I have tried TinyCAD before and I quit using it because I didn't like how the schematics look. There are plenty of libraries with many symbols, but there are also duplicate symbols that look different in other libraries. Some look good, some don't. I didn't actually start to use TinyCAD until I made my own libraries that I'm gonna share with you at the end of this post.

Free EDA: Design and simulation with LTspice

This is the first part of a series articles about turning a circuit idea to design using only free software. EDA stands for electronic design automation and Wikipedia has a nice comparison table of software for this job.

Before drawing the schematic and designing the PCB we need a circuit idea. Then we will use the free circuit simulation software LTspice to simulate our design. This is what this article is about. LTspice is developed by Linear Technology and it runs native in Windows and Mac OS X. The Windows version runs without issues on Linux using Wine.

This is not a LTspice tutorial. For that we recommend Terry Sturtevant's and Simon Bramble's tutorials. You will also need electronics knowledge. See All About Circuits, Learn Electronics Online or Learn About Electronics.