PCBs, a well-known abbreviation for "Printed Circuit Boards", are an essential, internal piece to many electronic appliances and devices. They make up the base to join all the components together to make circuits, involved with creating primary functions for a device. However, not many people can see these boards from the outside, as they are internal pieces which can often be covered up by a case or many layers of material. Smaller electronic devices, like smartphones or watches rely on these PCB boards to make its size compact and to make sure that all components are permanently in place, whether they are surface mount or through-hole components. Furthermore, solder on PCB boards ensure that the components are conductive to electricity and held in place firmly on the board, making PCBs excellent for commercial products which require high precision, quality control and accuracy with their circuits. Little do some know, but PCBs can be designed, fabricated and shipped to your doorstep made by any maker or electronic hobbyist, as there are many PCB manufacturing companies worldwide who offer such services for a reasonable price. To start with, you can design your customised PCB on many free PCB design softwares which includes the like of Eagle, TinyCAD, KiCAD or Fritzing. More about how PCB design softwares play a role in PCB manufacturing will be explained in the paragraphs below. Plus, this article will also mention the steps which you will have to perform once receiving your PCB to make your circuit or project work successfully, so be sure to read the full article from start to end. Designing your own PCB is the first most important stage in this simple process and you can do this if you already have an idea of what you want to make and the schematics of that specific project. You can design anything from the simplest LED circuits to MPPT solar charge controllers, which may take multiple boards collectively. Some people have even made their own Arduino microcontrollers or miniature computers, but you will need to extensively plan for a project like that. However, with any project idea which you have, you can easily place it into a PCB design software, which enables you to draw up the schematics with a whole variety of components already built-in for your requirements. From there, most softwares have an automatic function which can transform your schematics to your PCB, and you can line up all the components and change the size of your components if needed. The board size, pad size and layout can be customised with most programs. This is a simple process and will not take a lot of time in total. After that is done, you will need to route the PCB tracks, which will connect each component up on the PCb itself, depending on your circuit. This step can be effortlessly done manually through the PCB software or with an automatic routing function, which only selected programs may consist of. Make sure you check that each component is correctly routed with the track having the correct width, length and route as desired. Now, the last step of this PCB process is to verify and check your PCB design to see if you have made any errors, which may halt the whole production process with your PCB manufacturer. Some PCB programs may also have a viewing feature where you can instantly have a quick glimpse at what your PCB may look like once fabricated and the cool factor about this feature is that you can also see your PCB with different solder mask colours. At this stage, the only thing which you will have to do is to order your PCB from any manufacturer which suits your needs. There are many PCB manufacturers around the world, but one which I would recommend is JLCPCB from China, as they are known to provide good quality PCBs to both consumers and commercial customers. You can check them out by clicking this linkhere. Upon the arrival of your PCBs, you will need to solder the components to the PCB if you did not purchase the PCB with any PCB assembly service. Thus, you will need a soldering iron, solder, solder flux (optional) and other desoldering devices like solder wick, a desoldering pump or hollow needles. To make your life easier when soldering components to your PCB, it would be advisable to use a third hand or PCB holder to securely hold your PCB in place while soldering components. There are different methods to hold components in place as it may fall out while soldering but I normally would place a bit of "blu tack" to keep all components in place while the whole PCB is flipped around for soldering. Furthermore, heating up your soldering iron to its optimal temperature and tinning your iron with a little bit of solder before soldering it essential for maximum thermal transfer. Also, before your soldering iron comes in contact with your PCB, be sure to apply a reasonable amount of solder flux so that solder will flow on the pads and stay in place, instead of solder just flowing everywhere else. With that said, you should be ready to solder your PCB up with ease! By the way, after the soldering is complete, do a quick inspection for any solderbridges or small mistakes which you may have not seen, as those issues can lead to a short in the circuitry. If any solder mistakes are present, be sure to use your desoldering tools until the mistake has been resolved. Finally, you can clip each of the components' legs off with pliers and power your PCB up with whatever power supply it requires. You are now done with making a simple design or project idea come to reality! As you have seen by the above paragraphs, making a PCB from start to finish is really quite simple if you have a plan of what you need to do. You can transform any circuit into something amazing, which is on a professional level, where it can be turned into a commercial product as well, so if you have any spare time, try and make some of your favourite circuits into a PCB! Conclusively, be sure to check out JLCPCB for any of your PCB manufacturing or PCB assembly needs by clicking this linkhere.
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