The Smart, Stealth LED Blinkenlight

Step 4 Lay out the circuit for wiring.

Since I was using EAGLE, I had access to the board layout functionality. I decided I was going to use the "Manhattan-style board construction" as described in http://www.k7qo.net/manhattan.pdf. Basically this involves starting with a plain copper-clad board and gluing on small pads of insulation-backed copper-cladding that will act as contact points. If it doesn't make sense now, don't worry about it because the pictures in upcoming steps will make it clear.

Using the router, what I was trying to accomplish was simply to orient the components so any "node" in the circuit (that is, any wire in the schematic that goes to two or more component pins) had zero distance. In other words, I was trying to do a rough layout so I could put a single pad for each node and connect all the components to it without using jumper wires.

I didn't bother to carefully select appropriate component packages because I was at first just interested in designing the circuit. The capacitors, therefore, are far larger than the ones I actually used. Further, the battery and LED's (and R4 that limits the LED current) are to be mounted off-board. The switch was represented with a 2-pin connector. Finally, I decided that the plain copper-clad board I was going to use as a base should be connected to battery-positive rather than negative because I happened to have more connections to that than to battery-negative. In EAGLE there's a way to flood a board with copper areas, but I didn't figure out how to do that so I just made the positive wires all on the "front-side" layer in red.