Hi Steve,

The kids in )Oak Harbor High School use Eagle for custom boards for the robotics classes and competitions. It's inexpensive if you can get an educational copy, but you need to know someone "inside". 

Perhaps your local High School is part of the F.I.R.S.T. Robotics http://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/frc and could help you out. They are always looking for funding to support their completion, so your company can make a donation to the team, and one of the kids could do the layout for you?

Since it's relatively simple, another thought is doing it the old fashioned way: http://www.evilmadscientist.com/2013/how-printed-circuit-boards-are-designed-1960-edition/. I'm sure you could craft something useable. In fact, I owe you a favor, so PM the schematic, I probably can do this quickly.



Ed Popielarski
Engineering Manager


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-----Original Message-----
From: TechNet [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Steve Gregory
Sent: Friday, December 04, 2015 9:32 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [TN] Process guy looking to start trying to do board layout...

Hi All,

Many of you know me, and know that most of my career has been a hands-on, out on the production floor kind of process guy , but now I'm looking at trying to do board layout.

Yeah, yeah I know, forget about it. But I'm not looking to do anything complicated, it's a small 1" X 2.85", 2-layer board with 3-LED's, a through-hole right angle push button switch, 5-holes that a little wire harness can be soldered into, and two mounting holes.

I've often thought about learning more about board design and layout, but my plate always fills up with the day-to-day production and process issues so I wind up pushing that off to the back burner and don't think about it again for a while. So now the idea has popped up again. The story is that we build this little board for a customer and now they want to change the size and layout and use a different switch. So my boss asks me if this is something I can do, we don't have any design guys here. I have Pentalogix ViewMate Deluxe and do gerber edits to apertures in the solder paste layers for the stencils I buy, but don't really change the layout of boards, ViewMate is not meant for that. I explain that to him and he asks if he bought the software would this be something that I would be interested in doing, so now the opportunity has presented itself again.

So I've been looking around and I'm not looking the buy a seat at a full-blown CAD station, just something inexpensive and simple to use. So I've been looking at Eagle, and my question is, have any of you used this?
Is this software a good starting point for a rookie like me? I know there is an IPC Designers Council forum, but those guys are so far ahead of me that I don't want to waste their time. Any feedback is welcome.

Steve

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