Design Your Own PCB

// November 10th, 2005 // My Stuff, Technology Bits

Alan recently pointed me at Pad2Pad in response to my article about eMachineShop.

Pad2Pad is a way to get custom PCBs manufactured and delivered. You download the software, design the circuitry you’re looking for and then order it up.

Why is this fun and interesting?

Lately Jon, Al, me and others have been repeatedly involved in various electronics projects. Hacking a couple different consoles, building a magstripe reader to find out what identity information is encoded on the cards in our wallets, and planning some new projects. In the meantime Al has become crazy good at soldering increasingly complex things. We’re looking for more challenging projects.

We recently designed a device for building a switch controlled array of LEDs to attach to your office door. This would have a red, yellow, and green light so our administrative assitant could easily tell how busy we are without asking. Her idea, seemed like fun, but we never actually built it…

Now Jon is planning a new-fangled binary clock which should be way cooler than the one on ThinkGeek. Anyway, with these electronics examples you can see why a bunch of guys like us might like the idea of getting custom designed PCBs.

After using the downloadable tool, the one complaint I have is there is no simulator to test your logic. I’ve used LogicWorks a bit, and that is one of it’s strongest features.

electronics, Alan Baker, thinkgeek, pad2pad, emachineshop, solder, soldering, hacking, hack, magstrip, magnetic stripe, PCB, PCBs, binary, binary clock, clock, LED, LEDs, console

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5 Responses to “Design Your Own PCB”

NoSheep! » Electronics Projects says:

November 12, 2005 at 12:48 pm

[...] Jon has recently been excited about electronics projects he’s been finding in MAKE Magazine. In reading about Pad2Pad, I found them linking over to Electronics Lab which has all kinds of fun electroncs projects. [...]
Dr. Evil says:

February 15, 2006 at 3:53 pm

http://www.5bears.com/pcb.htm

while Pad2Pad is nice, its way over priced. there are quite a few sites that demonstrate the inkjet resist method of making PCB’s for cheep.
jak says:

August 5, 2006 at 3:11 am

hi
lino says:

August 26, 2006 at 3:16 pm

Can u build for me one portable magnetic reader small with dimension 2 cm L and 1 cm W?Just to read trak 2 and to collect the date in memory.I need software for this and cable to see the information in computers.
Thanks!!!
sks says:

February 23, 2007 at 2:02 pm

the pad2pad software is easy to use, but their service is ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE. my order is several days late (and i paid a significant premium for expediting the order) and they are sporadic at best about keeping me apprised of the latest status. there is no phone number and if/when they respond to e-mails, it takes 12-36 hours for a response–that pushes your delivery date back even further. i strongly recommend avoiding this shop.

No Sheep