Badminton Scoreboard III: PCB
Saturday, 22 February 2014
Now that I got it working with a bare ATmega168, the next logical step is clearly to create a custom circuit board for the Badminton Scoreboard.
I followed along with SparkFun’s excellent tutorials on setting up Eagle and using its schematic and board layout tools. For getting the PCB created, one of the places SparkFun recommended was OSH Park. OSH Park lets you upload an Eagle board file, so you don’t need to generate Gerber files. Their site gives you a nice preview of what the board will look like, so you can check out the solder masks and your silkscreening before committing to an order. They charge $5/square inch for 3 boards, including shipping, which seems pretty reasonable to me.
Here’s what I came up with:
The top:
and the bottom, which is supposed to look like a bit like a badminton court (not to scale, as I positioned the court lines to avoid the pads as best I could):
I read a few tutorials on bare board Arduinos and never really got a consistent answer on what values to use for the bypass capacitors, so I winged it a bit. I’ve no idea how well the winging went, if I spaced the components out enough, or if I laid the tracks properly, but I should find out when I get the boards back in a couple of weeks.
I followed along with SparkFun’s excellent tutorials on setting up Eagle and using its schematic and board layout tools. For getting the PCB created, one of the places SparkFun recommended was OSH Park. OSH Park lets you upload an Eagle board file, so you don’t need to generate Gerber files. Their site gives you a nice preview of what the board will look like, so you can check out the solder masks and your silkscreening before committing to an order. They charge $5/square inch for 3 boards, including shipping, which seems pretty reasonable to me.
Here’s what I came up with:
The top:
and the bottom, which is supposed to look like a bit like a badminton court (not to scale, as I positioned the court lines to avoid the pads as best I could):
I read a few tutorials on bare board Arduinos and never really got a consistent answer on what values to use for the bypass capacitors, so I winged it a bit. I’ve no idea how well the winging went, if I spaced the components out enough, or if I laid the tracks properly, but I should find out when I get the boards back in a couple of weeks.