• Please note that Audiokarma will be offline briefly for updates early on Monday morning, September 28th.

Circuit Board Building

tapetech

tapetech

Repair Professional
Does anyone know of a company that will take a drawing of a circuit board and turn that into a real circuit board? None of the PCB companies I have contacted will do that. They all want "Gerber Files" to make the board and I can't make those myself (yes, I have downloaded board design software, but can't make any of them work). So I need to pay a company to convert my drawing into a circuit board (or turn my drawing into a Gerber file so I can sent that file to any PCB company).
 
Register to hide this ad
I don't know if they still exist but you could get blank copper circuit boards along with a bottle of etching solution from Radio Shack back in the day.

I used to make my own boards all the time but since Radio Shack is now defunct, I have not done a search as it no longer interests me. :(
 
Yes, if it's a simple circuit board you could make your own. Ferric chloride etches away the copper, so the basic idea is to mask the areas of the board you want to keep (ie the tracks and pads) so the ferric cholride doesn't etch them away. The ultra simple way is to buy some copper clad board, draw the tracks on using nail varnish, and then etch the board with ferric chloride.
Commercial PCB makers will want gerber files to work from. Maybe a kind soul on AK will offer to create gerber files for you, but there's quite a lot of work involved.
Another option is to not use a circuit board at all. What is it you're trying to make?
 
I already have made one circuit board by hand. Now I need about 25 copies of it, so I need to convert my board drawing into a Gerber file and send that to a PCB manufacturing company. And as I stated before, I can't work the board design software myself (being computer illiterate).

Yes, a kind soul has already sent me a PM about doing this for me and I will follow up. I, of course, will pay for any help in doing this.
 
Technically it should be fairly easy to convert a photo or bitmap file to a gerber file, but you don't get a drill map or cut locations. Scaling, rotation, and skewing may be needed. So generally people will need to redraw the whole layout in some CAD program and then export the gerber file.

Unfortunately redrawing in a CAD program almost as difficult as designing the circuit from scratch and yes it will take some time to redraw if it's not a trivial board, with lots of opportunities for making an error. Are PCB CAD designers minimum wage workers? Unfortunately no...

(I've been known to extract, redraw, and repost peoples photos of "interesting" boards posted on forums, though not this forum, at least yet. However the maximum size I'd do is quite small because they take time to ensure correctness... and yes money would well compensate for larger boards...)
 
Last edited:
rothwellaudio said:
Yes, if it's a simple circuit board you could make your own. Ferric chloride etches away the copper,
Click to expand...

I have made many, I print the design onto "inkjet" photo paper using a "laser" printer, then iron (using my wifes steam iron set to dry on the highest heat setting) the design onto the the copper clad. I also use Ammonium Persulphate which is much more user friendly than Ferric Chloride and can be bought at most electronics supply shops.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom