Category: Printed Circuit Board

Weekending 12022012

This week in Barcelona started with the pleasure of having Quadrigram making the cut of the finalist of the Strata 2012 Startup Showcase. The tool is a couple of weeks away from seeing the light and the teaser video is now online. At Strata, I will present the tool with my friends at Bestiario right after my session on Sketching with Data.

On the invitation of Claro Partners to present the lab, I took the opportunity to present my experience working with network data, particularly focusing on the methods we employ to help innovate in the domain of ‘big’ data. Have a look at the slide deck: it starts with a reference to Napoléon Bonaparte ‘Un bon croquis vaut mieux qu’un long discours’, goes through the uses of sketches as part of any creative work exemplified by Le Corbusier, and concludes with Picasso and the art of sketching.

Okay. What else? In Los Angeles, we used a solder paste stencil for the first time. Impressed. Good stuff. Definitely worth $25-$50. You can tell in this video I haven’t used solder paste in awhile..I forgot to put the proper hot, hot air on so I’m basically just blowing balmy air on the board. More practice, again. I have to say, the stencil is definitely a time saver. Although, I’m still going to get a big-ass pick ‘n place machine cause that’d make it even faster to get boards done. ((That’s EarFreshener up in that video, by the way.))


Nicolas came to town on Saturday and Sunday we went to the crazy flea market at the Pasadena Coliseum, home of the Rose Bowl. We found weird things and Nicolas found a fantastic mint-condition Polaroid in its crushed red velvet case. Lucky old salt. Prior to that, his week was focused on both phone call with Lift12 speakers and the final presentation for the head-mounted display project, which went fairly well. Results from this field study are kind of secrets so far but there will eventually be a publication about that.

Weekending 21012012

Fabien and Nicolas went to Madrid for a workshop at BBVA innovation about Smart Cities. Organized by Urbanscale (and more specifically by Jeff Kirsh, Adam Greenfield and Leah Meisterlin), it focused on opportunities to use networked data for the client. It basically followed up on the previous work we have done with this bank last year.

The workshop went well, with a combination of short talks, field observations (qualitative and quantitative) and discussions. This workshop was followed by an open session entitled “Beyond Smart Cities” at BBVA’s Innovation Center, with Adam Greenfield, myself (Nicolas) and Kevin Slavin. My slides are on Slideshare. There’s a write-up of the event at the following URL. As described by Kevin on his tumblog, “As surely as it feels like a movement has a name (“Smart Cities”) it also feels like the critique of said movement is collectively more articulate and persuasive. Now the key is to find language to describe what it should be, to go beyond popping the balloon and figuring out what the party really needs.“.

Here in Los Angeles Julian has been hard at work puzzling over an incredibly simple problem of making a little audio device called an Ear Freshener avoid having a power switch and a volume knob. He thinks the solution was intimated by a generous comment poster who told him to slap a couple of transistors in strategic locations in the circuit. So he tried that. It seems to make sense. Hopefully it won’t destroy everything.

Related to this were discussions about the principles behind/between things that make sound — such as sound should just come out of them, rather than be all fussy with settings, configurations and network connections. And that tied into an ongoing thinking thing about latter day considerations about “simplicity”, “one thing done well” and skinny Williamsburg/Brick Lane 23 year olds with full beards who’ve done nothing to deserve a full beard but rock Holgas and fetishize film/vinyl/casette tapes fixed-gear bikes and the like. Thus, we’ve been working on a short essay on the topic of the Cult of the Analog Cult. Or something like that.

Meanwhile, on the East side of L.A. Jayne (with Kickstarter funding in hand) has been getting back to making new Portals. They’re still in the physical draft/sketch phase of things but making the upgrade from end-table-foam-core to mdf feels quite satisfying. The insides are still very rough and she’s still getting started with hooking up the magic/technology bits, but at least now a pair of Portal boxes exist in the world, ready to be filled with interactive goodies.

Continue reading Weekending 21012012

Sound Should Just Come Out Of It

I think going forward I should do a better job of talking around what we’re working on from a technical point of view, until such time as it’s okay to talk about what we’re doing from a principles, rituals and practices point of view. And, also — sometimes in the thick of a design-making-schematic-and-hot-air-baking fire-fight, I do something that I”ll likely have to do again, but without a good, thorough practice of writing things down to remember I, like..forget.

Here’s the thing. I’m making a little tiny audio device. It’s tiny and meant to be simple to use. Like Russell taught me — the thing about audio? You should be able to just turn it on and sound comes out.

I like that rule. That’s what radios used to do before all the knobs, settings, configuration preferences, long vertical scrollable lists and Internet connections fucked things up. You turn the little serrated rotary dial and *click* — radio sound. At worse? Static. But sound started. No swipes. No multi-finger gestures. No tyranny of the 10,000 hours of music & sound in the palm of your hand..and no idea what you want to hear.

There’s something lovely about that that is just pragmatic from an IxD and UX design point of view. I’m not being nostalgic.

So — translating this principle and making it active and not just a sweet, essentialist sounding statement into the guts of the things we’re making, I spent most of yesterday pondering how to make Ear Freshener exhibit and embody and be an exemplar of this design rule. Even to the point of saying, okay..no on-off switch.

Huh?

Yeah, well — the Ear Freshener has the advantage of being a plug-y thing. No speaker. It’s an intimate audio headphone thing. You’d only expect sound out of it when you plug in your headphones. Otherwise — it’s just a little thing that’s quite opaque. There’s only the tell-tale 3.5mm hole that indicates — audio/sound/plug-in-y-ness.

So — simple enough. I decided that plugging-in should equal sound-coming-out. That means that the plug action should turn the actual electronics on. In the world of audio connectors, CUI, Inc. is the go-to operation — along with what I’m sure is a thriving, teeming “ecosystem” of knock-off competitors who may even produce a superior product. They make all sorts of audio connectors for the world of audio devices. There’s a collection of them that have more than the three connectors that are necessary for a Tip Ring Sleeve style stereo audio signal, including the SJ-43614 which is a 3.5mm plug with four signals. The extra one switches from floating (not connected to anything) to ground (or the “sleeve” of the connector, which is normally connected to ground) when you plug a plug into it.

Brilliant. Something changes when you plug the plug into the SJ-43614. One of those signals on that connector gets shorted to the GND rail of the circuit.

Now..what to do with that state change in order to turn the whole circuit on and make sound come out of it with no fuss, no muss.

I pondered and scritched and screwed my face and looked for the answer somewhere on the ceiling over there. I thought of lots of overly-complicated things (as it turns out..in hindsight..) like using a low-power comparator to activate the chip-enable pin of the little 200mA step-up switching regulator I’m using so I can run the circuit off a single 1.5V battery cell.

In that over-designed scenario the NCP1402 step-up regulator is effectively the power supply for the circuit, which wants at least 3.0 volts to operate properly (and draws about 40mA). I can get an NCP1402 hard-wired to output 3.3v, although I may get the 5v version to have a bit more headroom with volume. In any case, this chip is fab cause you can take a little 1.5v cell and it’ll tune up the voltage. Of course, it’s not 100% efficient. Nominally, it’s about 80-ish% efficient at 40mA. So..you lose a little, but you can’t get something (5v) for nothing (1.5v) without giving up something in the trade.

NCP1402SN50T1 efficiency versus output current


So, I have a 1.5v battery of some sort which sits behind the NCP1402. The NCP1402 has an active high chip-enable (CE) pin that turns the chip on — effectively powering the rest of the Ear Freshener circuit. In my overly-complicated scenario, I figured I could use a comparator to sense when the 3.5mm plug had been plugged-into because that one switched pin would go from floating to ground. If I had a simple little 10k resistor between the positive 1.5v side of the battery, the comparator inputs could go on either side of that resistor, with the IN- of the comparator on the side of the resistor that would get shorted to ground when the plug is plugged in. And then the IN+ of the comparator would go on the side of the resistor that is connected directly to the positive side of the 1.5v battery. When the plug goes in, the IN- of the comparator goes to GND, the 10k resistor has a little, negligible-y minuscule current draw and the voltage difference between IN- and IN+ causes the output of the comparator to saturate to pretty close to IN+, or +1.5v. The NCP1402 chip enable would trigger (specs say anthing about 0.8v means “enable” and anything below 0.3v means “disable”) and the whole thing would turn on.

Click the image to expand it and make it easier to read. This is the lousy, over-designed circuit.


How convolutedly and moronically clever is that, especially when you stop to think (as I did, after proudly building the schematic) that you could just use that pin from the plug shorting to ground as a way to close the GND rail of the whole circuit. I mean..if you disconnect the NCP1402 from GND, it should turn off. Basically, it’d have no complete, closed, power supply circuit. It’s as if you pulled the battery out — or half of the battery out. Or ripped out the ground wire.

Anyway. It was clever to get all busy with a comparator and stuff. Simple’s better, though.

This is the simple, no-brainer one that eliminates the need for several additional components.


That’s it. I like the principle and I like even better the fact that I can translate a lovely little design principle into action — materialize it in a circuit that exhibits a fun little unassuming behavior. I can imagine this’d be a bit like wondering if the light stays on in the fridge after closing the door, you know?

So sound stops coming out, the circuit powers down and you no longer need an on-off switch. Stop listening? Turn off. So much nicer than long-press, id’nt it?

Why do I blog this? Cause I need to capture a bit more about the production of this little Ear Freshener-y gem.

Update


Here’s my update on the power circuit. I hope it works. I added two transistors in place of the comparator. The idea here is that the transistor on the right would switch the CE of the step-up switching regulator. When the base goes low — i.e. when the 3.5mm plug is plugged in — the switch opens and CE gets switched to roughly VBATT and enables the step-up regulator. For the transistor on the left, plugging in opens the transistor and VBATT gets connected to the step-up regulator and it, like..steps-up VBATT to VCC. When the plug gets pulled out and floats at VBATT, the two transistors saturate and are on. So on the right, CE is at Vce or effectively ground and shuts the step-up regulator off. The transistor on the left does similar and VBATT drops over R6 and VBATT_SWITCHED is at GND and there’s no longer any supply to step-up, even if the step-up regulator were enabled.

That’s the idea.

We’ll see. I haven’t computed the values for the discretes around the transistors as of yet.

Related — I’ve just sent off the PCB to get fabricated. It’ll be a 2-off prototype. I’m using AP Circuits for the first time because my usual go-to guys Gold Phoenix are off for the Chinese New Year and I need to get this done for some building & testing next week.


But I think I mucked up the CAM data files I sent them, which appear to be slightly different from Gold Phoenix. They want other stuff, like the NC Tool list which I’ve never sent to Gold Phoenix. I guess we’ll see what they say.
Continue reading Sound Should Just Come Out Of It

A Few Things The Laboratory Did In 2011

LOS ANGELES

Projects
* It was a year of mostly audio creations ahead and around of Project Audio for Nokia. Some very exciting little bits of design, fiction and design, fact. These will continue into 2012 with some more public than others, necessarily. The over-arching theme of creating a renaissance of Audio UX across the board and to say — listen, we’ve been very screen-y over the last, what? 50 years. Our screens a nagging jealous things. What about our ears? Has design fallen short in this regard and actually is design incomplete insofar as it relies so heavily on what we see and what we touch, sit in and so forth without regard to the studied appreciation and elevation of what and how we hear? Effectively, sound is an under-appreciated and, from within the canon of even just UX and Interaction Design — basically ignominiously ignored.
* Made a couple of little electronic hardware things, but not as much as I would’ve liked. An incomplete portable audio mixer; an incomplete portable Ear Freshener. Those’ll go into the 2012 pile.
* We worked on a bit of Radio Design Fiction for Project Audio at Nokia. The conceit was to work with and understand radio as something that possibly everyone did and had — rather than centralized broadcasting, such as big commercial radio stations — everyone had a radio and possibly radio was a viable and successful alternative to personal communication such that point-to-point communication (e.g. cell phones) never took off because a bunch of powerful men met in a high-desert compound in New Mexico and conspired to make Zenith and RCA the largest corporations in the world. Cellular never takes off and AT&T becomes a little lump of spent coal in the global economic smelter.

Presentations & Workshops
* At the beginning of the year was the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium. I went, and mostly listened. I think I got happily wrangled into facilitating something.
* There was the 4S conference where I presented on a panel to discuss the relationship between science, fact and fiction. David Kirby was on the panel, so that was tons of fun. Discovered this book: Science Fiction and Computing: Essays on Interlinked Domains, but then realized I had it already.
* I participated in a fun panel discussion for the V2__ Design Fiction Workshop in Rotterdam
* I went to The Overlap un-conference outside of Santa Cruz
* I went to Interaction 11 to see about the world of interaction design.
* Australian Broadcast Corporation interview on Design Fiction — Transcript and here’s the actual audio and stuff.
* Interview on Vice – Talking to the future humans with Kevin Holmes.
* Interview on Steve Portigal’s The Omni Project
* UX Week 2011 Design Fiction Workshop
* Fabulous Project Audio workshop in London with the fine folks at Really Interesting Group.
* And there was Thrilling Wonder Stories event at the Architectural Association in London in October.

That’s all the stuff that I can remember right now. I’ll add to it for the Laboratory log as things return to my memory.

BARCELONA

Projects
Our main investigation line on network data (byproducts of digital activity) brought us in direct contact with the different actors of the urban environment (e.g. city authorities, service providers, space managers, citizens) jointly exploring the opportunities in exploiting this new type of living material. Our projects strategically split into self-supported initiatives initiatives and client works with a common objective to provide new tools to qualify the built environment and produce new insights for its actors. We experimented complementary approaches with observations and prototyping mutually informing our practice. For instance, along our investigations we like to employ fast-prototyped solutions (see Sketching with Data) to provoke and uncover unexpected trails and share insights with tangible elements such as interactive visualizations and animation. We found it to be an essential mean to engage the often heterogeneous teams that deal with network data around a shared language. Practically, we teamed up with:

* A real-time traffic information provider to produce innovative indicators and interactive visualizations that profile the traffic on key road segments.

* A multinational retail bank to co-create its role in the networked city of the near future with a mix of workshops and tangible results on how bank data are sources of novel services

* A large exhibition and convention center to perform audits based on sensor data to rethink the way they manage and sells their spaces.

* A mobile phone operator and a city council to measure the pulse at different parts of the city from its cellphone network activity and extract value for both city governance and new services for citizens and mobile customers.

* elephant path is a pet project to explore the actual implementation of a social navigation service based on social network data. Would love to develop it more, automate it and port it to mobile. It won the 2nd price at the MiniMax Mapping contest.

Product
The second part of the year was also dedicated to collaborating with our friends at Bestiario to land a product that provides tools for individuals and organizations to explore and communicated with (big) data. Our role consists in supporting Bestiario in matching market demand with product specifications, orchestrating the design of the user experience and steering the technical developments. Quadrigram has integrated now our data science toolbox.

Presentations
* After staying out of the stage for most of the year (expect a lecture at ENSCI in Paris), I entered the polishing phase on the work with data with a talk at the Smart City World Congress.

Publications
* Our friends at Groupe Chronos kindly invited us to participate to an issue of the Revue Urbanism. We contributed with a piece on the ‘domestication’ of the digital city. I also wrote a text for Manual Lima’s recent book Visual Complexity. The text was not published eventually, but I appreciated the opportunity to write about my domain for a new audience.

We have been actively collaborating with academic entities such as:

* Yuji Yoshimura at UPF on a follow-up investigation of our study of hyper-congestion at the Louvre. The first fruit of this collaboration that also involved Carlo Ratti at MIT has been published in the ENTER2012 conference proceedings: New tools for studying visitor behaviours in museums: a case study at the Louvre
* Jennifer Dunnam at MIT for which we collected Flick data used in her Matching Markets project.
* Francisco Pereira at MIT for the article Crowdsensing in the web: analyzing the citizen experience in the urban space published in the book From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen.
* Boris Beaude at EPFL who helped us run a the co-creation workshop on open municipal data at Lift11
* Bernd Resch at University of Osnabrueck who spent endless hours developing and run models for our specific needs for spatial data analysis

and studios and individuals:
* Urbanscale for their effective and beautifully crafted maps
* Olivier Plante who designed Elephant Path
* Bestiario, the team behind Quadrigram
* Brava, our german graphic designers

GENEVA

Projects
* Three field studies about the appropriation of various digital technologies: Shadow Cities (a location-based game), 3D interfaces on mobile displays, the use of head-mounted displays in public settings. While the first one has been conducted internally (and will result in a presentation at the pre-ICA conference), the two others have been conducted for a French laboratory in Grenoble. Although field research about this has been conducted in 2011, it’s quite sure that the insights we collected in these 3 projects will be turned into various deliverables (speech, articles, report…).
* Interestingly, the Geneva bureau has more and more request for projects out of the digital sphere. This year we worked with a cooking appliance manufacturer, a coffee machine company and a electricity utility on various things ranging from new product development (the near future of …) to co-creation workshops or training the R&D team to deploy design research approaches (based on ethnography).
* I also took part to the “Streets of BBVA” project with Fabien, contribution to the workshop series about the use of networked data for a spanish bank.
* My second book, about the recurring failure of digital products, has been released in French. It eventually leads to various interviews and speeches (See below).
* For Imaginove, a cluster of new media companies in France, I organized a series of lectures and workshops about digital technologies.
* The game controller project is slowly moving forward (discussion with editors, writing, drawings…). Laurent Bolli and myself not only work on the book but there will be also an exhibit at the Swiss Museum of Science Fiction (planned for March 2012).
* I wrote a research grant with Boris Beaude (Choros, EPFL) about the role of networked data in social sciences. It’s a quite big project (3 years long!) and we’ll have the answer by April 2011.

Various speeches and workshops
* Des usages au design: comprendre les utilisateurs pour améliorer les produits, Talent Days, December 1, Lyon, France.
* Panelist at Swiss Design Network Symposium 2011, November 25, Geneva.
* Mobile and location-based serious games? At Serious Game Expo, November 22, Lyon, France.
* Les flops technologiques, ENSCI, PAris, November 17.
* My interaction with “interactions” in interaction design, ixda Paris, November 16.
* User-Centered Design in Video Games: Investigating Gestural Interfaces Appropriation, World Usability Day, Geneva, November 10, 2011.
* Fail fast. Learn. Move on, Netzzunft, Zürich, October 27.
* Wrong is the new right, NEXT 2011, Aarhus, Denmark, August 31.
* Robot fictions: entertainment cultures and engineering research entanglements, Secret Robot House event, Hatfield,, UK June 16.
* Tracing the past of interfaces to envision their future, Yverdon, June 9.
* Traces and hybridization University of the Arts, London, June 19.
* PostGUI: upcoming territories for interaction design, Festival Siana, Evry, May 12.
* The evolution of social software, April 7, Lyon, France.
* De l’ethnographie au game design, Brownbag Tecfa, April 15, Geneva
* interfaces & interactions for the future” Creative Center, April 8, Montreux.
“The evolution of social software”, April 7, Lyon, France. Gamification Lift@home, March 3, Lyon.
* Smart Cities workshop with Vlad Trifa and Fabien Girardin, Lift11, Geneva, Switzerland
* Culture et numérique : la nécessité du design, L’Atelier Français, January 27, Paris, France.

Teaching
* At HEAD-Geneva, at masters level, I taught a semester-long class about user-centered design (how to apply field research in a design project) for two semesters. This fall, I also taught interaction design and acted as tutor for 9 masters students (which is obviously time-consuming!).
* At ENSCI, I conducted two week-long workshops/courses: one about reading in public places, one about the use of rental bikes with Raphael Grignani (from Method).
* At Zurich school of design, I gave a day-long course and workshop about locative media last June.
* At Gobelins Annecy, I gave a three day course about innovation and foresight, last June.
* At HEG Geneva, I also gave 3 lectures about innovation and foresight last fall.

Weekending 11202011

Ack. Just a few short notes from the week previous.

Well, we got some more clarification on the graph of possible-probable-desireable but I wasn’t able to spend as much time figuring out how to employ it as an approach to design — I mean..not that I’d figure out anything crazy in the midst of a work week. But, then John Marshall sent a note that tipped me back into this idea of Device Art which has notes of things that are like “devices” perhaps in the sense of an instrument designed to achieve in the product sense, but then also art.

..device art is a form of media art that integrates art and technology as well as design, entertainment, and popular culture. Instead of regarding technology as a mere tool serving the art, as it is commonly seen, we propose a model in which technology is at the core of artworks.

So aside from this idea of the tool serving the art, but the tool itself being the art — you’re going to begin to flirt around in some curious territories in the possible-probable-desirable Venn diagram seeing as much art deliberately avoids that center sweet spot and confronts common-sense ideas as to what is, should or could be.

*shrug. It’s a start anyway. Besides, I like the idea of lots of small, little device-y things that do very unexpected, unusual but, maybe at the end of it, desirable and profitable things, but they have to be made by hand by artistans. Or things that are desirable, but not profitable but easily made. What would they be?

There was a curious visit to the Oblong Industries loft-y-studio in downtown LA late last week. You’ll know Oblong as the place where John Underkoffler evolved his diegetic prototype of gesture-based interfaces developed in Minority Report. So — that’s what they do there..and this time around rather than paying lots of attention to what the gestures were doing. I’ve decided they’re weird. It’s just one of those things where — whey you look at the world from a slightly different angle, everything looks different and then you start to wonder. It’s like closing one eye or standing on your head or putting on weirdly lensed glasses and you see something that makes you go, “huh..”

There were a bunch of things that drew my attention — first the scale of the gestures is a bit much. If you do a two-thumbs-up-and-throw-them-over-your-shoulder you perform a kind of screen-reset to put everything back to state zero. That’s useful. The gesture is a good sort of — get-outta-here sort of thing. It’s very articulated. Then there’s this one you see above — the Meatloaf-y “Stop right here!” gesture. There are others.

I’m not faulting the system. The technology works and its fun to try and its fun to watch. It makes good sense in specific contexts where you have big display systems and doing micro-gestures (relative to the scale of screens) with a mouse does not really make good sense. And I can clearly see how this bigger system them have works well in the context of certain work environments, like the guy doing operations stuff for Seal Team 6 while they’re charging into some crazy part of the world. It seems very tactical in a way.

What I was most intrigued by was the scaling-down of their systems to smaller environments and environments without those nasty gloves and big IR tracking configurations. They had a set up with what looked like an Xbox Kinect sensor for doing just broader gestures, without all the finger-twiddling of the bigger set up. This is interesting for simple navigation of things in, perhaps — a retail environment. So now we’re closer to the Minority Report thing of advertising talking to you.

Last thing was some continuingly somewhat frustrating prototyping of some audio objects. Frustrating because once you’re spoiled by the ease of working with kits like the Arduino or, for that matter — iOS — getting to know a new poorly documented chipset is like having your eyeballs dried out. But — at least the tech support guys are prompt with little hints as to what they mean when they describe something that needs a secret decoder ring to comprehend.

Continue reading Weekending 11202011

More PCB Stuff

R0014185

So, I’ve been pretty happy sending printed circuit boards off to this Gold Phoenix operation in China. It feels global to do my manufacturing offshore and its certainly a heck of a lot cheaper than doing it onshore. Frankly, my budget is my pocket money and every penny counts. I’ve been even happier that I can do this stuff all on my own and learn just how these things are made. I mean, it’s one of those things I wish they had maybe taught us back in electrical engineering school, but maybe they thought it was too vocational. Anyway, I really haven’t used a drop of what I learned from back then, honestly. Maybe they taught me how to think or whatever. Who knows.

Anyway, I’ve been overwhelming myself with new projects because I can make my own boards, and being able to have multiple designs fit on one larger panel is really fueling the preposterous number of projects underway. I found out about Gold Phoenix through Nathan/Spark Fun‘s boardhouse batchpcb, which I’ve used in the past. I needed more boards done quicker and in greater quantity than made sense with batchpcb. Nathan never hid the fact that they’re an aggregator for Gold Phoenix, producing amazing prices for very small quantities if you could wait 15 or so days to get them back. For the quantities I needed (couple dozen) it made more sense to go directly to Gold Phoenix.

(You can read this as “Part II” of a review I did earlier of about four board houses.)

So, it’s the same drill to get your boards done, even easier in some regards, but much less hand-holding so you need to pack a reserve ‘chute the first time around. If you have a single design, you basically generate your Gerber‘s the same way you normally do. I even used the Spark Fun Electronics CAM file to generate the Gerber’s. SFE has a tutorial right here for using Eagle to generate Gerber’s. I’ll repeat a few things here.

The Gerber‘s are basically (barely) human readable, but mostly machine readable, text files that describe what goes where on your PCB. For instance, from where to where a bit of copper should go, where a hole goes and how big its diameter. That sort of thing. So, it’s the physical description of your layout, one file for each layer of the board. I’ve only done two layer boards. That is, two layers of copper. Which means that I have six Gerber files plus a drill file. The Gerber’s are one each that describes the top and bottom copper, one each for the top and bottom solder mask, one each for the top and bottom silk screen. Finally, there’s this “NC drill file” used to describe the drilled holes (vias, mounting holes I poke through the board, any through-hole components, etc.) So, that’s six Gerber files and a drill file. You zip those up into a .zip file.

Eagle spits these out when you run the CAM processor using the SFE-Special.cam file that Spark Fun Electronics graciously makes available. It basically does what you need to be done.

Top and bottom silkscreen is a little tricky because it actually pulls the silkscreen from two special layers (_tsilk and _bsilk) that are created by another script (or “ULP” for user library program) also provided by Spark Fun. This other script is called silk_gen.ulp. What it does is make your silk screen drawings a bit “thicker” than the default thickness created by Eagle. It actually copies the geometry and patterns from the normal (by convention) layers that are used to draw paint (silk screened, but I doubt the process involves and actual silk screen nowadays) on the boards. Those layers, best as I can tell, are tPlace and bPlace (top and bottom placement marks for components.) If you run this ULP you’ll see all the tPlace and bPlace redrawn in a different color — and if you check your layers you’ll notice that two more appear in the “Display” pane of Eagle. What happened is that everything in tPlace and bPlace is drawn thicker in _tsilk and _bsilk. You’ll see any text thickened, etc. Evidently, this is necessary for the actual process of applying the silk screen paint to the board.

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The files that you need for production are generated by the CAM Processor. These are:

Top Copper (CMP)
Bottom Copper (SOL)
Top Soldermask (STC)
Bottom Soldermask (STS)
Top Silkscreen (PLC)
Bottom Silkscreen (PLS)
Drill File (DRD)

While we’re talking about layer mishegoss, you’ll notice that there’s also the Dimension layer that looks like it’ll be drawn in paint, but that layer’s geometry does not get drawn as paint — I’m pretty sure it’s used to define the boundaries of the board as the board will be cut out of the panel. I’m not 100% sure how the process works, but empirically — based on runs I’ve done — this’ll allow you to shape the board into whatever shape you need. (See below, some of the boards have slightly rounded edges, and one even has a bit cut out where a battery can fit.) What gets drawn in paint and what doesn’t is determined largely by convention. These “silk” layers are handled by the CAM Processor as layers to be drawn in paint by putting the geometry in the top or bottom silk Gerber files. Whatever geometry you put in that file will get drawn as silk. If you mess up and put your copper geometry in there, they all of your traces and pads and such all will get drawn as paint, which is pretty cool, but something mostly people don’t want. Essentially you’re giving whatever hulking steampunk machine is on the other ed of this instructions on where to lay copper and where to lay paint and where to drill holes and where to cut PCB.

Okay, so — you’re probably better off following Spark Fun’s tutorial, because that’s just a brief summary of the drill you’ll go through. I’m just trying to get to the point of seven Gerber files zipped up into a zip file.

For the Gold Phoenix run, you just email that zip file to their guy Shane in Toronto with a description of what you want. I’ve been taking advantage of these summer specials they’ve been offering. It’s a menu of options such as how big a panel you want your parts cut from? What weight of copper? How thick should the boards be? What color soldermask? What’s your thinnest trace, etc.

For example, for this batch of parts, my order looked like this:

SecondPanel.jpg

That’s about it. No web form. No drop-down box. My shipping address? I put it in the PayPal form when I paid my $159. I had multiple boards that I put in the layout — those six separate boards? So I had to fork over an extra $30 as a tax for making their lives a little bit harder — fine with me! I get five projects taken care of at once. My board file looked like this (it’s like a board of boards, really):

GoldPhoenix070507.jpg

This was just a board, no schematic. Each one of those individual parts there? They were each designed separately, on their own the usual way. (Create the schematic in Eagle, create a board from the schematic, place parts, route, etc.)

This board of boards was created as a new board design — just a board, not a board and schematic. This is the board design I’ll use to generate Gerbers and drill file for the final thing I send to Gold Phoenix. But, first you need to put all the individual solo-created boards together on this blank board. (I think this is basically what happens when people do what they call panelize or panelizing, but I might be wrong.) You’re basically going to create one board with lots of smaller boards on it. The outlines for each smaller board are what the Gold Phoenix people will use when they cut up the larger board into smaller pieces. They’ll also do the “step and repeat” process of filling up the larger panel with multiple instances of the one board that contains lots of little individual boards.

This is like a three layer Russian Doll. You have your individual boards for some little design projects you’re working on. Then you have this board that contains each of those little board designs, placed thusly so that there’s a little space between them and they don’t overlap and maybe even consume a rectangular shape, etc. Then there’s the “panel” which is the sheet of material that will become a big sold piece of lots of little designs.

When I got the boards done individually, I turned on all the layers in Eagle, and used Eagle’s “cut” command (confusing..it basically means copy) after selecting everything and placed the individual board on my one larger mothership board. I did that for each design. (One of the designs I put on twice to make the basic outline of the whole thing roughly rectangular. I just sort of assumed that that would make more efficient use of space for the step-and-repeat process of duplicating this design across the larger panel. Todbot thinks that they maybe adjusted the placement of my individual pieces because, by my calculations, I should’ve gotten 9 of each piece and instead I got 10. Anyway, 10 is better than 9.)

So, what Gold Phoenix ends up doing is taking this one board of boards and making it fit in 1000 square centimeters as many times as they can. This is why I get many copies of each board, 10 in fact of each board because my board of boards can fit 10 times in 1000 square centimeters because its just about 100 cm square (120 actually on my side, but, like Tod said, they must’ve tightened up my board of boards on their end.) They saved me a lot of trouble this way. Rather than me having to make a board of boards 1000 cm square, they do it for me based on my one board of boards template.

This is what showed up in the FedEx pouch from China 9 Days Later (coulda been sooner if I paid a little extra for extra fast turn-around.)

R0014186

R0014191

I don’t think you can beat that for quality, quantity, time and price with any of the other four or five places I’ve tried. One place was $33 + $40 shipping and handling (scam) for one tiny board, no soldermask (yeech..) no silk, 5 day turn-around. Like..hello?

Printed Circuit Board Fab Houses — A Few Reviews

So, I’m at the point with the Flavonoid project that I need to start getting printed circuit boards made. (The printed circuit board includes an accelerometer, a real-time clock, touch sensor, and a bit of EEPROM memory, if you want to know.) A fair bit of the break was spent schooling up on Eagle, doing layouts, making mistakes and that sort of thing. (It’s remarkably full-featured for a free product and, despite a few quirks, does what it says it will do. Plenty of activity in the forums and help is quick to come when I’ve gotten in trouble.)As I closed in on a design I thought was close enough to gold to send off, I started poking around various forums to find out what operation might be suitable for small (1-10 piece) runs.

It turns out that most of the places you’ll hear about won’t do fewer than 5 pieces, and they’ll charge you for it, too. By way of example, I considered trying Advanced Circuits as the Spark Fun FAQ suggests them if you’re in a pinch for time. It’d have to be more than a side-project financed with my own wallet to use them, but maybe they’re better for big projects. (I compare them to the other two board houses near the end of this post.)

The one great exception is Batch PCB, the operation started up by the Spark Fun guys. They’ll do single pieces for, like..$2.50 per square inch. In my limited experience, that’s a great deal. In exchange, you’ll have to wait a bit longer to get your boards back — I think they’ve worked something out with their guy in China so that the numbers work out to get that kind of pricing.

The two places I’m trying are Batch PCB and PCB Fab Express. I picked PCB Fab Express because they had something they refer to as a special for prototypes, but it’s still pretty expensive (but less expensive than other places that’ll turn something around in under a week). I’m doing this so I know what my options are in the future. I can imagine times when waiting a couple of weeks is fine, and other times when I’d like to have something in a few days.

Batch PCB

This is Spark Fun‘s boardhouse operation, which I’d generally just use without even thinking twice, and I have, basically. The one small thing that makes it not necessarily a slam-dunk is the turn-around, which will be at least 10 days. But, that’s probably just fine, except sometimes I feel anxious. But, you know — it’s not like I have customers waiting for product or anything..just me. So, that aside, the Spark Fun guys are friends of the cause and so I support them whenever possible. What you’ll get are 2-layer (seems like they’re doing up to 4 now) boards with pretty much everything. No need to count vias or stuff. Silkscreen on both sides. 8 mil wires and a recommended 10 mils spacing. You can order one board if you want, which is fantastic (as opposed to most other places that make you order 5 of something for which you need only one, or which isn’t 100% yet, so you may end up getting 5 drinks coasters for your $100.) You can put more than one design in your board and just score the two, which can save you some trouble. They have one thing that most places don’t even think to provide — a simple, short-and-sweet Eagle tutorial on preparing your Gerbers. They have a hopped-up forum, where answers to your questions come back pretty lickity-split. Their DRC bot sends you a decent design review summary within a few minutes of uploading your Gerber .zip file (I’m still waiting to get back the DRC from PCB Fab Express, which I sent in a couple of hours ago.)

Flavonoid PCBs from BatchPCB

Flavonoid PCB’s just arrived from BatchPCB.com

All-in-all, this is the place to go if you can wait a couple of weeks for your parts. The PCBs you see above were sent in on December 28, and arrived on January 18. Considering generally delays during the holidays, and that Boulder (where those guys are) got socked in by a nasty blizzard, I’d say that’s satisfactory. Total cost for four boards with express shipping was $49.92 Compare to $82.95 for PCB Fab Express, five boards, five days, super-saver shipping. If you’re in a rush or just hopped-up and heads-down in a project, I’d guess the extra $30 is nominal. Note that PCB Fab Express won’t silk screen the back of the board, but that’s not such a big deal in most situations, particularly for prototyping.

One thing I noticed about the boards is that they’re not all 100% the same footprint. By this I mean that the way they were cut out of the larger panel (with probably lots of other people’s boards on it) resulted in slightly different dimensions. I mean, slightly. If you put the boards together like a sticks of gum in a pack, you can tell that some are slightly larger/smaller along the various dimensions. One even seemed slightly curved. This could be an issue if the packaging in which these boards are placed has critical sizing issues. But, it’s ever so slight — nothing that a fine file couldn’t smooth out, if it even caused a problem. (I’m talking about something that’s noticeable if you eyeball it, and measuring, it seems to be about 1mm or less discrepency in size.)

Summary: BatchPCB.com, four boards, silk screen on both sides, 14 business days turn-around, with a blizzard interfering, $49.92 with shipping.

Note that BatchPCB turn-arounds get shorter the more work they do as a company. Presumably, they are able to fill panels sooner and ship whatever minimums they need to their guy in China. Now (January 19) they say they’ll panelize a board in four days, so the turn-around is likely closer to 10 days or thereabouts. That’s fantastic. I also found BatchPCB to be much more “user-friendly”, as is generally the way with the Spark Fun team. (Their tutorials are excellent, particularly the one on does and don’ts for prototyping, all based on real experiences. Don’t forget their surface mount technology tutorials, too, found here. I had two situations where I needed to cancel an order I had submitted. Fortunately, it hadn’t gone too far into the cycle and they could delete the order. Their DRC bot is also quick and provides some useful graphics to give you a sanity check about what precisely you’re submitting.

PCB Fab Express
Okay, this operation seemed a little weird from the get-go, mostly because I got a call about 20 minutes after I created an account. (That sort of bothers me.) But, I talked to the sales guy and was assured that when I submitted by Gerber zip file, I’d get a design review check done and an email back. I submitted my Gerber zip file and must’ve misread something somewhere because my order was put “in process.” The board, my fault completely, had a ground plane copper pour that seemed okay, but I noticed that there were these friggin’ vias going through it. It was just all messed up, but I fixed it in about 3 minutes. Unfortunately, if they even had a DRC, it didn’t catch this (not sure it would’ve, even though it basically meant that nets that shouldn’t connect were connected.)

I tried to cancel it (calls and emails) but probably between a mix of my not being as attentive to what I clicked on and the holidays, there was no way to get the order out. I think there’s a problem in the Gerber I sent them, and I’m a bit surprised I didn’t get a DRC email or anything, but..well..I guess chalk that up to experience. (Update — it seems fine after eyeballing the boards I got.) Their prices are a bit more reasonable than other operations for the turn-around — 5 boards, 5 days, $82.95 with tax and “super saver” shipping. They’ll do a finer line spacing than is typical (6 mils). The largest drill hole they’ll do is 246 mils plated, which is fine, only sometimes a mounting hole might be larger, possibly. They have some restrictions on the average number of holes per square inch, which could be annoying if there are lots of vias or whatever. Two-layers, but no silkscreen on the bottom, which one can typically live with for a prototype.The boards just came in, which is exciting. The problem I thought I was going to have didn’t appear for some reason. Unfortunately, I over-wrote the board file from Eagle and so I can’t double-check what I sent them. (I could look at the Gerber’s, though.)

I don’t have all the parts yet, but just a cursory look-see and I thought of a few notes to think about for any redesign.

Flavonoid PCB Prototype Recto

PCB Prototype Recto from PCB Fab Express Flavonoid PCB Prototype Recto

PCB Prototype Verso from PCB Fab Express. Notice there’s no silkscreen on the bottom.* First, some of the vias are unnervingly close to the pins of the DS1306. I’ll look for that in the future and put in a via keepout or something.

* Second, the crystal for the RTC I pulled from the crystal library. The pads for the package aren’t much bigger than a via, and there’s not much of a pad to speak of on the thru-hole. It might be just as well to find an SMT pad for it, or perhaps there’s a package in the crystal library for a surface-mount device.

* The mounting pin for the coin cell battery holder on the back is a bit close to the VBAT pad I put back there. I’m not sure if that mounting pin is connected to anything electrical in the coin cell holder, but I need to check just to be sure.

Summary: Quick turn-around. No hand-holding despite getting a sales call and promise of an email once I submitted. $82.59 with shipping for 5 boards, $16.52 per board, $6.19 per square inch. They took normal Gerber’s RS274X. I used the CAM processor user language program that Spark Fun provides for Eagle in their tutorial.

Advanced Circuits
Expensive and no real reasonable hobbyist pricing for a prototype option. This is probably “okay” for some situations, but certainly not for a hobbyist who’s just looking to get some boards done. No fault, no blame. Just thought I’d add it in since I went through the trouble of checking them out, but I won’t order from them.For comparision, I got a quote from Advanced Circuits for my test case — this Flavonoid PCB that you see above. For a “prototype” run, five boards in 3 days (the longest possible turn-around), it was $47 per board, or $235 without shipping. Their best value deal is 2 days, $57 per board. One day is $61 per board, and same day is $117 per board. Their production pricing — 50 units, say — is $5.86 per board in 2 weeks, or $7.57 a board in 3 days. So, roughly speaking, BatchPCB (described below) is priced in the same ballpark as Advanced Circuits’ production prices, even at single units. My BatchPCB boards came in 2 weeks and cost $7.50 a board ($2.50 per square inch, rounded up.)

Conclusion It’s hard for me to think why I would not use BatchPCB unless I really needed boards quicker than two weeks. If I need something in under a week, I’d go with PCB Fab Express. And, if I really am in some kind of project where I need dozens of printed circuit boards, I’d almost certainly go with BatchPCB — it’s just the best value.

If anyone has any suggestions of other board houses, please drop a line.

R0014191

Update! I’ve been using Gold Phoenix when I need more boards as soon as possible — under a week. I haven’t completely run the numbers, but it’s pretty clear that for more than 10 boards or so, they’re the place to go to. If I need just singles of boards and can wait, I’ll use BatchPCB. I have a review of Gold Phoenix here.
For $89 (special summer deal pricing) you can get 1000 sq centimeters of PCB. When I put six designs on this size, I got 10 of each back. That’s 60 total boards. I paid extra to have some special features like white soldermask and black silkscreen and a $30 tax for multiple designs. Still, it seems like a great deal. Turn-around was under about 12 days.