I’ve always stayed away from PCB fabrication and SMT components, but my realization now that I’m back into electronics is it’s many years past the point where you can avoid SMT I bought the Pulsar PCB (“Fab-In-A-Box”) kit and I’m very happy with how it performs.
Within 30 minutes I had my first PCB and it looks fantastic. Only “issues” I found were that 1) the green film transferred to areas without toner, a piece of scotch tape fixed this PERFECTLY per their instructions. 2) The “wipe with sponge” method of etching worked well, but took a lot longer than 45 seconds for me. No big deal.
It’s basically as easy as they make it look, very impressive a total newbie can build a PCB in 30 minutes for a couple bucks in materials! Not sure what I think about the 1/2oz copper or .032" PCB thickness, only time will tell if it proves to be an issue.
I’m more interested to know about supply of SMT objects. For me, in Australia, I can go down to Jaycar and get a hand full of resistors and capacitors etc, even DIP chips, but where the heck am i going to get the SMT equivalents? Certainly it’ll be likely I can’t just duck down on a Saturday afternoon when I figure out I am missing something - unlike the Jaycar scenario today.
PCB’s do not mean just SMT, you can continue to use thru-hole. There are few good electronics shops outside the metro areas in the US, here we have RadioShack and a couple smaller suppliers, but outside basic assortments you have to order what you need.
I was going to work on a tutorial, but I bought a new laser printer and it the toner it spits out doesn’t stick to the PCB’s… will have an update soon if I find a printer that works!
consider that a $10 discount in the Panda/USBizi order !
Farnell seems like such overkill. I have a HEAP of thru-hole stuff in my hands (probably in the order of thousands of resistors of varying values) and to be even close to “equivalent” stock might be “restrictive” I reckon a smattering of values would be fine, but then there’s sizes to think about etc. Ah all seems too hard
I’ve been thinking one of the projects I’d like to do is build a thru-hole Domino with more IOs. I just haven’t got time to expand out the board in Eagle and then update all the parts to thru-hole; but I reckon that would be another great hobbyist platform - then again, now there’s Panda… And then again, if I can eventually progress to SMT then the usefulnes of thru-hole Domino boards is pretty low I guess…
I bought the Pulsar PCB (“Fab-In-A-Box”) kit and I’m very happy with how it performs.