Today i’ve spent some more time playing around with Eagle and this link, seeing how hard it was to design a custom Arduino Shield PCB for the fermentation controller.
Here’s a pic of the circuit diagram from Eagle:
Well, admittedly, I don’t really know what i’m doing, but it’s been fairly easy following the guide and building a PCB. It lacks a bit at the end though when it comes to exporting Gerber files (which is what a PCB manufacturer expects) so I’m kind of stuck for now; but i’ll do some more research later and find out what I need to do.
There are a number of relatively inexpensive manufacturers of custom PCB’s around on the net, so I’m thinking of ordering some just to see how they come out. Might even use one 🙂
Do you need some further clarification on Exporting gerber files? I’ll help where I can 🙂
As for production, I highly recommend including your board in Laen’s board order via http://oshpark.com/. It’s inexpensive, and the manufacturing isn’t done sub-par (We have a USB based board manufacturer)
Alternatively, if you wanted to you could order my breakout shield, which looks like it would fit your needs 🙂
Thanks Aaron. I’ve since done some more research; and it’s mostly my own mis-understanding of the process, however I’ll clarify:
On the site it says: “We want to use a specific CAM job, so we have to go to File->Open->Job… Choose your cam job, and you should get an updated CAM processor window:”
But, which file needs to be picked? At the time I wasn’t aware that some PCB manufacturers supply these files with what they need (at least Seeed Studio Fusion do).
Also, the options are confusing, and as a total PCB beginner, I have no idea where to start 🙂
Otherwise, the guide was incredibly helpful!
I appreciate the comment!