New LibrePCB user. I used to design boards as part of my job, but that was several decades ago and I’ve forgotten most of it. Im 79 so stuff comes way slower.
I want to start with a simple manual layout board that needs no schematic. I need to create a 3.25” square single sided board with just several rectangular copper pads on one side and several holes. Stuff gets soldered to the pads. So my basic questions:
Can I change dimension units once a project is started (mm to inch)
Is there any way to size the board or a rectangular area by just click and draw a corner (like a drawing program)? or at least stay vertical/horizontal? Making something square seems like a pain.
I assume I use the DrawPlane took to make a rectangular copper pad? Is it OK if planes overlap?
Is there any way to get drawing “guidelines” to help align object placement on the board (like in photoshop)?
Not yet. We will implement this some time in future. At the moment the easiest ways are:
Either set the grid e.g. to 0.25" and draw the outline polygon manually
Or just modify the properties of the automatically added board outline polygon to enter the coordinates.
Hmm not really. Planes have no solder mask opening. You would have to add an additional polygon to create a solder mask opening. Generally it is recommended not to draw pads directly in the board editor, but create a footprint in the library and add the footprint to the board then. Adding arbitrary pads directly to the board will be supported in the next release which should be ready in January.
Not really yet, we have a feature request open for this. What you can do is to draw polygons on the Alignment layer, but it’s just a graphical help without any snapping functionality or so. And whenever you need to place an object ob specific coordinates, you can use the properties dialog to manually enter X/Y coordinates.
RE: Changing dimensions: good to know I can change dimensions, but how do you do it? I can’t find any menu/option on the screen to change dimensions.
The board I need to make will have no solder mask. in that case, will drawplane work OK? I suppose I could also use a series of overlaping wide traces to do the same thing?
Thanks for taking the time to respond, I appreciate it. Nice product, great job so far!
The dimension is specified as a normal polygon, therefore you just need to modify the polygon properties which can be done by double-clicking (or right-click → Properties). In case you deleted the outline polygon, you need to re-draw it. See Draw Outlines.
Hmm yeah in that case, planes should generally work and are similar to overlapping traces.
I seem to have a few random via’s on the board for some reason. “Useless via in net” Is there some way to get rid of them?
The board is just single sided. I used draw plane tool to make a ground plane (where the vias show up), is there a way to make a rectangular non-copper area in the ground plane? Thanks.
I am finishing up two simple boards now. I will definitely try 2.0 next. Congratulations.
BTW I tried submitting my small board to all three of the fab companies you use. The German company kept giving me ERROR 403 when I tried to register. PCBway was very confusing with trying to pay. Not sure they ever got the order.
NextPCB offered PayPal to pay but when I used Paypal, they could not figure out if I actually paid. Still not sure.
Oh that’s not good If you can provide some more information (e.g. the URL and/or the step of the registration which failed), I could report it to them. If you still can reproduce it, a screenshot would be nice also.
Honestly I almost cannot believe all three websites are broken. Especially the chinese ones are huge companies with tons of projects ordered every day. I wonder if you maybe use some adblocker or other invasive browser addons, and/or a very unusual browser? At least with PayPal I usually need to disable the adblocker basically on every site, not just PCB companies…
I can reproduce the 403 error at the German company. I have another board I will try it with again today and get screen captures.
The two Chinese companies are not broken, they were just a bit difficult. PCBway needed me to use Payoneer which I never heard of. The problem seemed to be communications between Payoneer and PCBway was not working. After a few emails back and forth I think they got it to work.
NextPCB used PayPal, but again after paying through Paypal, they did not get the info that I had paid. THey said they could not proceed without payment. Again after some emails where I gave them Paypal info, they did some checking I guess, but it finally got resolved.
I submitted the same board to both companies to see show they work. Both companies were very nice and responded to my emails within a day. I am going to try them both again. Probably mostly my first time errors.
Alright, thanks for clarifying. Great that your could resolve it with the Chinese companies already. Just let me know if you have any news about the 403 error.
I went back to Aisler again with a new board. This time it let me make an account with no errors and I think the board went through with no comments. I was able to use Paypal successfully.
Fingers crossed.
If you can provide some more information (e.g. the URL and/or the step of the registration which failed), I could report it to them. If you still can reproduce it, a screenshot would be nice also.