|
Being able to breadboard a new circuit is an important skill to have, and is consequently a necessary step in many types of similar projects. This skill is especially important when you need to move wires around and substitute various components. Breadboarding gives you the flexibility you need to easily knock wires out all together. If your project is valuable, you will want something with a little more permanence. All of these shortcomings can be solved with printed circuit boards. Most people do not consider transforming their project into a printed circuit board design because the fabrication of this technology can be expensive and is viable only in commercial quantities. While you could avoid these expenses by building the PCB yourself with etches and silk screens, this can become a messy and time-consuming process that is not ordinarily recommended. Also, if this is just a hobby for you, the technical constraints involved with printed circuit board design can be daunting. However, these days a professional printed circuit board can be produced quite inexpensively for those who wish to try it out. The perfect candidate for transforming your project into a printed circuit board is to already have the design in hand, with all the components within reach. A simple design can be built around a 555 timer chip, a power transitor, a couple of diodes, two resistors, and three capacitors. This is a relatively small amount of components, which should make the project go a lot quicker and easier. The hard part is getting them all hooked up on the breadboard. These components could eventually all add together to create a variable LED illumination system with a pulse-wide-modulation circuit. While the cost of a single board used to stop most of us from building our own printed circuit boards, there are ways around that now. For example, BatchPCB is a company that consolidates the individual projects into a single large board and then cuts them apart when they come back from the factory. This way you can fabricate a board for about $20. There are also design programs that you can download online, such as Eagle, that can help you design your PCB. For those new to this technical hobby, a printed circuit board consists of a thick, rigid, insulating layer with conductive traces on the top and bottom. These traces can run over each other because of the middle insulation. By drilling a hole in the board called a via, signals can be transmitted from one side of the board to the other. You can also drill holes for ICs, resistors, diodes, and other small pieces. The components have solder pads, which allows them to be soldered in place. There are other methods of getting the signals from one side of the board to the other, such as purchasing components that are created to be connectors, or by leaving larger holes with solder pad rings around them to solder external wire directly. You could also add layers with traces in between the top and bottom, but these methods usually tend to cost more in the end. No matter which method you decide to use, BatchPCB will give you the best deal on components. Now you are ready for the first step in creating your own custom printed circuit board, which is to lay out the schematic view. Place all of your desired components out on a canvas and connect the pins with lines representing electrical connections. Many components come in different packages, so you will find that you have multiple choices for the same part number. If you are a beginner in this hobby, always go with the big DIPs (dual in-line package) and SIPs (system-in-packages) because they can be found at any hobby store and much easier to solder than those devices meant for commercial applications.
Related Articles -
printed, circuit, board,
|
