- cross-posted to:
- hackaday@ibbit.at
- cross-posted to:
- hackaday@ibbit.at
Breadboards are great, but as the world moves more and more to having SMD as a standard, prototyping straight PCBs is becoming more common. If you’re mailing off to China for your PCBs, it’s shockingly quick for what it is, but a one-week turnaround is not “rapid prototyping”. [Stephen Hawes] has been on a quest on his YouTube channel for the ideal rapid-prototyping PCB solution, and he thinks he’s finally got it.
Now, if you’re only doing single-layer PCBs, this is a solved problem. You can mechanically mill, or laser cut, or chemically etch your way to PCB perfection, far faster than the Chinese fabs can get you a part. If you want a double-sided board, however, vias are both a pain in the keister to do yourself, and a rate-limiting step.
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Nope, but it is an idea. I think he’d be better off with swaging a solid core copper wire. The vast majority of prototypes are primarily constrained by the enclosure. The other main need for vias is to use BGA and other small packages. The types of boards this services can just as easily work as a larger single sided design with jumper wires or resistors, and without the size constraints.
Vias are necessary for literally every part of electronics design beyond the basic I take a premade module and hook it up to these other 2 premade modules (which all have many vias on them), not just small packages.
Most PCBs nowadays are ≥4 layers. You need vias to use the center layers. Vias are necessary for ground return paths, stitching, shielding, RF plane coupling, signal integrity, and much much more. Single layer designing simply does not work if one is actually designing electronics and not just quick and dirty throwing 2 data busses together for a proof of concept.
BGAs don’t need vias, they are so small (0.5mm pitch and smaller) they usually need microvias (0.15mm/0.3mm ID/AR or smaller, which brings PCB prices from 15€ to 300€ for a set). Then the vias generally have to be filled at least and capped, optimally to not suck the solder through the vias from the balls. That is a whole other ballgame.
Um, no. That’s just plain incorrect. 🙄
Plenty of useful circuits that are beyond “chuck together a couple of modules” or a “proof of concept” can be implemented on single-sided boards. Look in any hobbyist electronics magazine and you’ll find many of the project designs still use single-sided boards. Many products on the market use single-sided PCBs. My Hakko soldering iron’s control board is single sided. Every PCB in my Sony amplifier is single-sided. The SMPS in almost every LCD monitor, TV and more, exists on a single-sided board.
I would like to see you try to tell the Sony engineers who designed my amplifier that they weren’t “actually designing electronics”, or to the Hakko engineers who designed my soldering iron.
Tell the engineers at Delta that every single switch-mode power supply they ever designed on a single-sided board doesn’t count as “actually designing electronics”.
By all means share the designs of all of the 1 layer boards you claim! I said nothing about single sided boards, my claim was about vias.
I would love to see “nearly every LCD monitor” that contains 0 vias! I would also love to see your SMPS designs that are 1 copper layer with no vias at all!
Having all of the components on a single board side is something completely different, you can have a 16 layer board with 10k vias with components only one one side.
Please, share all of these aerospace designs that use one single copper layer with 0 vias that isn’t hand wired!
A single-sided or 1-layer board cannot have vias. As a professional designer you should know this. I was not talking about a board with components only on one side. I mean a board with only one copper layer.
I never claimed that nearly all LCD monitors have 0 vias. I said their power supplies very often do not.
Here you go: Philips 55PUS6704/12 power supply board. Single sided board, 1 copper layer. No vias. Almost all of them are like this:
What has aerospace got to do with it? Nothing. Your claim seemed to be that anything other than high speed digital designs utilising BGA ICs, 4+ layer boards and a million vias don’t count as “actually designing electronics”. You appear to be trying to imply now that only electronics designed for aerospace use counts as “real electronics design”.
It sound like you are an elitist asshole, with a far too big ego, who probably also thinks that “only real programmers use assembly/binary/a magnetic needle and a steady hand/whatever”
Single sided PCB assemly, Single sided LCD controller with many, many vias, single sided PCB layout screenshot, all with vias. Single sided ≠ single layer which I think is where the confusion was coming in for me.
But you are right, looks like I have a lot more to learn. I have only ever made a 1 layer of copper PWM speed controller because I guess I am not good enough to make 1 layer PCBs. Almost every design I have ever worked on would be physically impossible to use a 1 layer PCB simply due to the IC package pinouts literally not allowing it. They get around the via problem in your picture quite cleverly by using a dozen jumper wires as via+2nd copper layer. Plus there are no non-discrete ICs which helps a lot.
I would love to know the supplier that Philips uses here, none of my suppliers were willing to do such hand-wiring-intensive work for anything less than a fortune.
But I admit, you have proven me wrong in that was quite the exaggeration to say that “literally every part of electronics design” requires multi layer PCBs. Though I never meant to imply that people weren’t engineers doing this. I was specifically addressing the response to OP because it was about SMD using a single sided board for SMD components and OP specifically talked about a replacement for sending boards to China or common PCB houses., but I reacted in way way too broad of statements which was wrong.
There are thousands of write wound boards, hand wired boards, or projects like this guy which are very well done and well engineered projects. Wire-wound PCBs were the first GPS modules also, and they were 10x the engineers I could ever hope to be.
I etch and design my own boards.
Me too mate.
Cool, what does that have to do anything? Are we just swapping facts about ourselves?
I am a professional electronics engineer with experience in high speed data signal integrity analysis, years of circuit and pcb design experience in medical devices, industrial, and consumer electronics with multiple products on the market, and designing and debugging for EMC.
If only you had professional experience in not over-inflating your ego with the contents of your LinkedIn profile.
It had to do with your tone and rudeness. Plus you are incorrect in some of your statements, but that is not something I care to address within a place that is about community and being a digital neighbor. The angst reply to a genuine comment is toxic 90s internet that should have died long ago.
That is a whole other ballgame.
Golf clap
I just build on Veroboard.
