First Homemade PCB
I made my first circuit board yesterday, and it was a lot of fun. I used the toner-transfer method, with an etching solution made out of hydrochloric acid and hydrogen peroxide. I more or less followed this guide, although I read at least a dozen on different methods. Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my camera to the workshop, so I only have a picture of the finished product, not the process.
The board itself is a breakout board I designed for the MAX1555, which is a very handy chip that handles the charging of single-cell Li-Poly batteries. It’s a small SMT component that goes in the upper right, and next to it are holes for 100nF capacitors to filter the power supplies. The bottom row of holes are connected to the MAX1555′s pins, and are spaced to take 0.1″ headers, making it breadboard-friendly.
Making my own circuit boards will be nice, because getting them fabricated is expensive, and it takes about a month to get them back. This board took me an hour to make, and probably cost half as much. While it’s lower quality, it serves my purposes just fine.
In the future, to make it easier on myself, I think I’m going to change the design rules for boards that I make. The traces on this board are 8 mil, and I think that bumping it up to somewhere closer to 15 mil would reduce the chance of broken traces. I also need more copper around the through-hold pads, because centering the drill with such a small margin of error is difficult to do by hand.
Ben Oztalay
