professional boards?

made a bunch of progress tonight on the boards. i was wondering about
how on a manufactured board the via's are through plated. i was
wondering if that meant that component holes are also through plated.
for example, if in kicad a component is connected on the component
side of the board, but you solder it onto the copper... will it be a
good connection because the hole where the leg goes through is plated?
just wondering... it would make it SUPER easy to do production boards
since you wouldnt really need to tweak kicads autorouting at all.

~Zach
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Zach Hoeken wrote:
> made a bunch of progress tonight on the boards. i was wondering about
> how on a manufactured board the via's are through plated. i was
> wondering if that meant that component holes are also through plated.
> for example, if in kicad a component is connected on the component
> side of the board, but you solder it onto the copper... will it be a
> good connection because the hole where the leg goes through is plated?
> just wondering... it would make it SUPER easy to do production boards
> since you wouldnt really need to tweak kicads autorouting at all.

Yes - all the holes on a professional board are through-plated. Thus if you
solder on only one side capilliary attraction pulls the solder through all the
holes round the components' legs.

Yours

Adrian

Dr Adrian Bowyer
[staff.bath.ac.uk]
[reprap.org]
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awesome! i should have the production size boards ready for you guys
to look at tonight after i get off work. hopefully someone can find
time to go over them and let me know if they're right or not...
hopefully they will be.

also, i had another question... on the pcb site, they said that their
limits are 8mil on traces and spacing, what does that equate to in
KiCad? i used a size of 25 for the traces on the production board and
it seemed to work pretty well is that 25mil? i just want to get
everything lined up and get this thing kicking because i've gotten
quite a few people emailing me about when the boards will get done.

~Zach

On 3/15/07, Adrian Bowyer wrote:
> Zach Hoeken wrote:
> > made a bunch of progress tonight on the boards. i was wondering about
> > how on a manufactured board the via's are through plated. i was
> > wondering if that meant that component holes are also through plated.
> > for example, if in kicad a component is connected on the component
> > side of the board, but you solder it onto the copper... will it be a
> > good connection because the hole where the leg goes through is plated?
> > just wondering... it would make it SUPER easy to do production boards
> > since you wouldnt really need to tweak kicads autorouting at all.
>
> Yes - all the holes on a professional board are through-plated. Thus if you
> solder on only one side capilliary attraction pulls the solder through all the
> holes round the components' legs.
>
> Yours
>
> Adrian
>
> Dr Adrian Bowyer
> [staff.bath.ac.uk]
> [reprap.org]
> _______________________________________________
> Developers mailing list
> Developers@reprap.org
> [reprap.org]
>
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Quoting Zach Hoeken :

> awesome! i should have the production size boards ready for you guys
> to look at tonight after i get off work. hopefully someone can find
> time to go over them and let me know if they're right or not...
> hopefully they will be.

Brilliant! Yes - we're about to make some more Universal boards, so
I'll have a check (it'll be late tonight for me, I guess, so it may
wait till tomorrow...).

I have done a little tidying of the comms and power board (basically
lining the connectors up, making the ground and +12v even fatter, and
adding a logo...). That's in the repository, and I'm about to make one
to test it as I type. (Thereby breaking my own recommendation that we
should test boards _before_ they go in the repository... Sorry; at
least the topology hasn't changed.) I'll make a photographic record of
that for the wiki.

> also, i had another question... on the pcb site, they said that their
> limits are 8mil on traces and spacing, what does that equate to in
> KiCad? i used a size of 25 for the traces on the production board and
> it seemed to work pretty well is that 25mil? i just want to get
> everything lined up and get this thing kicking because i've gotten
> quite a few people emailing me about when the boards will get done.

If you're in inches in kicad the units are mil (thousandths of an
inch); if you're in mm they're in mm. All of our stuff is much wider
than 8 mil so there shouldn't be a problem.

One thing though is getting the drill diameters right for each hole -
they'll need to know that. There must be some sort of industry
standard for this that I don't know, but I found that 0.7 mm (30 mil)
diameter for chip pins, resistor legs and so on is fine, and 0.9 mm (35
mil) is OK for connectors, the 8 chunky diodes on the Universal board,
power transistors, and the pins of the L298N. It may be simplest to
make everything 0.9mm...

The fat capacitor on the comms board needs big holes (1 mm for the ones
I use).


Yours

Adrian

[staff.bath.ac.uk]
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