My first PCB
I have done a few protoboards with the lovely point-to-point wiring. My intelligent motor control board (not pictured below) is a lovely example.
This (as you may know) is my custom programming board for Atmel ATmega and ATtiny processors. It's actually a very simple circuit overall, so I figured, what better to try a PCB with.
My chosen chemicals: peroxide and hydrochloric acid. They're cheap and they work. My transfer method: paper from a dell catalog. My chosen design software: Fritzing. I like Fritzing, it works fairly well. The breadboard view is virtually un-usable once you hit a certain component density, but the PCB view works nicely. Anyway, I created the circuit, printed it, ironed it onto the board, and then etched the board.
I think it came out really nice for my first try. Ok, so now I dunk it into some tinning compound and then take it to the drill press. A drunken monkey could have gotten straighter lines, but whatever, the holes are drilled.
Shiny. Alright, looking good. Now the fun part, desoldering all the parts off the old board. I didn't need to. Aside from the ZIF socket, I have plenty of spare parts. But I don't like wasting them.
So with my reclaimed parts, I set about putting everything onto the new board. You'll notice the power jack is smaller, I screwed up there. Fritzing defaulted to a 3.5mm jack and I didn't catch it until the design was done. I didn't feel like moving everything around to accommodate the larger jack, so I just used a 3.5mm jack instead. Also, some of the "silkscreen" rubbed off while working with the board. I repaired with permanent marker where I felt like it.
Overall, I think my first PCB came out nicely. You can see how the drunken monkey drilling caused some things to go on a little crooked, but nothing terrible. But to solve this problem in the future, I may need to come up with a small scale CNC drillpress. There are a few extra components, but for the most part, it's the same board, just much cleaner.
