Printed board wire width and current limit

Community PCB Design
1

Hello,

I am designing a printed board to control a CNC machine, so I need 12V and 1A (better support even 2A just for safety), but I could find nowhere a specification of how much current a printed board wire can handle, and if I should make the standard wires from Eagle bigger for my circuit. Any ideas?

This seams to depend on the material of the board, so I am using BatchPCB (and whatever material they use) to print the boards, but I also found nothing on their website about this. The analog part of the system is small, and isolated from the logic with a ULN2003, so I have the wires going from the ULNs to the connectors of the motors and also wires from the power supply, and also of course the ground wires which are common with the digital logic, which should probably be big too.

thanks,

2

Have you searched this Forum?

There was a related thread a little while ago.

3

I have searched this forum for keywords, will try now looking at previous threads.

4

According to the track width calculator in Pulsonix, 1A will need 11.8 mils width for 1 oz copper and 10C temperature rise. 2A will need 30.7 mils.

Leon

5

[Bingo.](http://forum.sparkfun.com/viewtopic.php?t=14361)

6

thanks a lot