PCB Development

It will be obvious for any subject experts arriving at this page that my first exposure to schematics, board layout, and PCB milling all occurred as a result of this project. But once you start milling your own PCBs, there’s no going back: wires alone will never be good enough. This page illustrates some of my earliest attempts at PCB design and manufacture. Though it ends well before our current layout, it at least runs up to our transition from in-house board production to outsourcing to US manufacturers.

The above devices were milled on an LPKF PCB milling machine. Once we were sure of our design and had the budget to proceed, we began ordering PCBs from online fabricators like Osh Park and JLCPCB using more advanced four-layer stack-ups.

For this project, I independently learned to use two PCB milling machines (an LPKF and an Othermill), Eagle for layout, reflow soldering, schematic design, sheet metal wiper and contact design, and the electronics library creation workflow in Fusion 360. Ultimately we produced more than 100 hand-made prototypes before moving on to injection molding for the external chassis, but never advanced to turnkey board manufacture, meaning the electronics assembly for every unit sold was hand-produced, programmed, and installed in my living room.