Design Your Own PCB
November 10, 2005 | 8 Comments
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.
Tags: Alan Baker, binary, binary clock, clock, console, electronics, emachineshop, hack, hacking, LED, LEDs, magnetic stripe, magstrip, pad2pad, PCB, PCBs, solder, soldering, thinkgeek