Help with PCB Design!

Community PCB Design
1

Hello,

I’m relatively (completely) inexperienced with PCB design. I have a senior design project to do, and I need some guidance. I need to create a board for interfacing with the Telit GE864-QUAD SMD. I saw that Sparkfun has a breakout board, but I would like to create one on my own instead of just buying that one.

I have used circuit simulation software (Micro-Cap 9) but never any PCB design software. I am presently tinkering with PCB123 and Eagle, trying to get a feel for it, but it hasn’t happened yet. I’m still studying and researching, but if anyone could point me in the right direction or give some advice, I’d greatly appreciate it!

Thanks!

2

There are lots of tutorials on the web. Have you tried any of them?

Leon

3

I seem to be getting good results with Eagle from what I learned from the Sparkfun Embedded Electronics tutorials:

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/tutori … als_id=108

I was advised on these forums to use nets to connect parts rather than drawing wires all the way from one to another - that seems to be working well.

There are a lot of little “gotchas” in Eagle, at least in the installation I’m using: allow yourself plenty of time, especially if this is a project for a class. For one example, I discovered that when I entered text to be placed on my board’s silkscreen layer, the default placement of text was on the bottom copper layer (why in the world anyone would ever want text in their bottom copper is beyond me). On my first board the bottom text is far from any traces, so it passed the design rules bot, but on my second board it was flagged when the text crossed a bottom trace, and that’s how I learned of my error, and realized that I need to move bottom text to the appropriate layer. Oh, and I learned to use gerbv to check the Gerbers.

Start out with a somewhat simple board, and go all the way through uploading it to BatchPCB for design rules check, even if you never plan to order one.

4

Thank you both for your help. I haven’t done any tutorials, but I’ve been reading various article and manuals (ExpressPCB and PCB123). From what I understand, Eagle is more professional though. Is this true? Why? I have the freeware version.

5

PCB123 and ExpressPCB are vendor-locked products. You must buy the boards from their respective companies (though PCB123 lets you buy gerbers). This is a terrible situation to be in.

Eagle is cheap (free and commercial licenses) compared to the other mainstream PCB tools (Altium, Allegro, Pulsonix, etc), which accounts for its hobbyist popularity. Its quite capable as a schematic tool and PCB editor, though it has its warts, missing features, etc.

For true freedom there is gEDA and KiCad. Both are open source and quite capable of doing the PCB layout work. Look at Evil Mad Scientist for some examples at using gEDA.

6

sylvie369:
I seem to be getting good results with Eagle from what I learned from the Sparkfun Embedded Electronics tutorials:

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/tutori … als_id=108

Thanks Sylvie. This tutorial seems to be pretty promising. I’ll report back after I do it.

I managed to find an Eagle library for the GE863, but not for the GE864. I’m going to check the tutorials and figure how to make my own.

Edit: Don’t need to make it; it’s in the Sparkfun library I downloaded!

Thanks again everyone!