
Westfw has a great Instructable on making printed circuit boards using EAGLE - "It's nice that there are some professional circuit board tools available to the hobbyists. Here are some tips for using them ito design boards that don't need a professional fabricator to actually MAKE them..." - Link.
Making hobbyist PCBs with professional CAD tools
Recent Entries
- New in the Maker Shed: Microbe Motel kit
- Science through graphic novels
- Tiny solar-powered brass engine in a wineglass
- Maker Shed kiosks at Fry's
- New hackerspace in Chicagoland: Workshop 88
- Mint tin electronics dev kit packs the essentials
- Olympus BioScapes competition winners
- Mac mailbox
- LHC tweets its first circulating beam of 2009
- Building a shop presence notification system
Comments
Oldest comments listed first.
Leave a comment
Subscribe to MAKE Magazine!
Subscribe today, save 42% and get web access to MAKE free. MAKE Digital Edition is available only to subscribers.
$34.95 / 1 year
(4 Quarterly Issues)




































I love the design tool expressPCB gives out for FREE. Make your design, print it to an Acrobat PDF and then import it 1:1 into Photoshop for printing on your own toner-transfer paper.
Works great, does not have all the components Eagle has, but enough to get you through mostly anything with a little creativity. And best of all, no size limitation that i've seen.
And, if you want to get a bulk run done, its all ready to send to them.
Reply to this comment
While milleker is right, he overlooks one important consideration: interoperability. PCB shops like Olimex, BatchPCB or Futurlec all take Eagle files (or Gerber files that can be generated from Eagle), enabling you to search for the right price for the amount of PCBs you are having made.
Sure, the size limitation sucks for some projects, but with some careful placement of parts and by routing by hand, you can get an awful lot of components on a very small sized board.
Reply to this comment