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Week 8, Electronics Production - Noah, Andrew, Tyler, Cooper, Wilson

This weeks assignment was to 

characterize the design rules for your in-house PCB production process
submit a PCB design to a board house

Work Distribution

  • Cooper: Charecterizing the bits used
  • Andrew:
  • Noah: Submitting a PCB design to a board house
  • Tyler:
  • Wilson:

Submitting a PCB design to a board house

What

Submitting a PCB design to a board house involves preparing and sending your design files for professional fabrication. This typically includes Gerber files, drill files, a bill of materials (BOM), and any special instructions for manufacturing. The board house handles processes such as etching, drilling, applying solder mask, and adding silkscreen text.

Why

Using a board house ensures higher quality, precision, and reliability compared to in-house fabrication methods like PCB milling. Professional fabrication offers:

  • Multilayer designs: No more being tied down by being unable to cross traces, a board house and vias allow for thinking in 3d
  • Multiple boards at once: The minium for almost every boardhouse
  • Tighter Tolerances: Achieve finer trace widths and spacing than most DIY methods.
  • Solder Mask and Silkscreen: Professionally applied for durability and readability, soldering is 10x easier
  • Consistency and Scalability: Ideal for batch production, ensuring each board meets the same quality standards.
  • Panelization: making multiple PCBs on one board, really cheap batch production with a proper design
  • Silk Screens: You can print graphics on the board, impossible with a milling machine alone
  • Solder Mask: You can cover up the traces you don’t want to solder, would be incredibly helpful when milling

Design Considerations (for JLCPCB)

If using JLCPCB as your board house, keep the following in mind:

  • Board Dimensions: JLCPCB supports large sizes, and boards from 10x10mm to 100x100mm cost the same, almost every board will be within this size
  • Layer Count: Supports 1- to 6-layer PCBs. More layers increase cost and complexity, generally 2 works for anything, with 4 allowing a power and ground plane ontop of 2 data planes, 4 layers stay pretty cheap, but above that adds great cost
  • Material: Default is FR4 (1.6mm thickness), but 1.0mm, 1.2mm, 1.4mm add no additional cost
  • Copper Thickness: Standard is 1oz ; 2oz is available for high-current applications.
  • Minimum Trace/Space: 0.152mm is the standard minimum. way better than a milling machine
  • They make the boards in china, so keep in mind for very rapid prototyping that for where we are located (US east cost) that our 8am (when we would expect the boards to start being produced) is exactly when they stop making boards for the day. Essentially, submit a board later in the day for it to go into production quicker

How

Assuming you are ordering from JLCPCB, It is highly suggested to install the Fabrication Toolkit. This plugin allows for a single click to export your board, with the right settings, for JLCPCB production. To install it, follow their guide

After installing the plugin, restart Kicad and then go to the finished PCB design you want made. On that page, in the middle of the top bar, there will now be a button that looks like this button

Once you click that button, a menu will pop up. For purposes not involving PCB manufacturing in the board house, no settings need to be changed.

After generating the files, go find the folder, called “Production”. Inside that folder, there will be a zip, which is the only thing you need for just PCB ordering.

With that zip, go onto JLCPCBs website. On the website, find the add gerbers option ordering 1

It will prompt for a zip file, and load in the file in the production folder.

After waiting a bit(10-20s) for the file to be processed, you can start to change settings for your board. As long as it passed the design rules checker, there will be no required additional costs, which will mean your board is either 2$ if theres a special offer(there almost always is) or 5$ with no savings.

There are some settings that you can change without any downside, for example the thickness, which can be anywhere from 1.0 to 1.6mm without a price increase. You can also change the color of the soldermask without additional cost, although it will take more time to make.

JLCPCB is also really good for cheap prototyping as it is the only major board house that offers a really cheap shipping, with the global standard direct line being around 1.50$, although it takes around double the time of the next fastest option (8-12 days, usually exactly 8).

After adding the board to your cart, select the board and then check out.

Receiving

During checkout, you pay and if you dont make an account, say where you want it delivered. There is virtually no benefit to having an account except for a purchase history, so it is not necessary. The box will be a blue box marked with their logo, very visible, and pretty alluring to package thieves if that is an issue in your area.

Charecterizing the Bits Used

Tool: 1/16” flat end mill

  • Feed rate: 59 in/min (1500 mm/min)

  • Plunge rate: 15 in/min (381 mm/min)

  • Spindle speed: 16,400 RPM

  • Max pass depth: 0.006” (0.15 mm)

Tool: 1/32” flat end mill

  • Feed rate: 59 in/min (1500 mm/min)

  • Plunge rate: 15 in/min (381 mm/min)

  • Spindle speed: 16,400 RPM

  • Max pass depth: 0.006” (0.15 mm)

Tool: 1/64” flat end mill

  • Feed rate: 15 in/min (381 mm/min)

  • Plunge rate: 15 in/min (381 mm/min)

  • Spindle speed: 16,400 RPM

  • Max pass depth: 0.006” (0.05 mm)

Last update: March 25, 2025