Professional PCBs almost cheaper than making them at home

Step 2 Place all the components

The instructable links on the intro page show how to create a pcb from a schematic using EaglePCB. One main difference is that none of the design rules about track widths need to be changed at all (the drc design rule check). The defaults are all fine and while the tracks look really thin and close to pads it doesn't matter as the green solder mask makes it very easy to solder. In fact, these sorts of boards are much easier than soldering up prototypes. Some big pads were used for connecting external wires and there were a few extra comments added for the white component overlay layer.

The wonderful thing about having boards like this made compared with building homemade boards is you don't have to worry about trying to optimise the autorouter for a single layer. Just run the autorouter once and it defaults to double layer mode and it always produces a 100% design automatically within a few seconds. Even with components a lot denser than this board Eagle always autoroutes the whole board.

Comments

[cardinalflyer]

This comment may be late in the game:

"always autoroutes the whole board"
Not true.
I have been creating Arduino-size PCBs (80x100mm, 60x80mm) with 3-4 extra SMD ICs, and Eagle has hard time completing it. One needs to take care with component placement or you find yourself having to clean up a lot.
Oddly, even with 2 ground planes, the place where I have been left hanging is ground connections! I've been having luck with that by moving signals around manually to let the lower & upper ground areas overlap and then adding a via to connect them.
I'm using the free eagle software, and have the 1-sheet schematic pretty full up, not a lot of interconnections shown to free up space, bunch of parts with just signal names hanging off.