Circuit Board Cad.

[james]

I know I can get parts on eBay for pretty cheap. I would price my kits to make it worth my time to pack it in a cardboard box and mail it to someone. Eventually, I'd like to sell enough to pay for all the boards I make so I would have money to make more. I'd like to have some in stock all the time. Once I start selling them, I don't want to be out and have to make people wait. I know I don't like to wait!

@tadawson, Thanks for taking a look at the files. Your profile says you're into pro audio. Are you into speaker design?

James.

[tadawson]

James -

I have dabbled with building some cabinets in the past, but fell into a really sweet four way/tri-amped EAW system, and have never looked back . . . powered with about 12KW of Crest Professional, it's sweet!

Oh, and I have a local parts vendor here that I can go pick pretty much everything needed out of their bins in pretty much any quantity desired - no need to order . . .

And what version of Eagle did you do these in? I'm still at 5.12, and it's refusing to open your files - sez "invalid data" . . . and the newer stuff was compiled with later C libs, and won't run . . .

Grrr . . . bonehead software distro!

- Tim

[james]

Really ??? I just got the most current offering from the source of Eagle CAD.

http://www.cadsoftusa.com/download-eagle/?language=en

Some time ago, I put together a tri-amped system for home stereo listening.

http://akrobiz.com/speakers/new/

(16) 8 inch woofers, (72) full-range TV speakers, (98) tweeters in the pair. -3dB at about 18Hz.

Years before I ever even thought about laser display or using a sound card to do it, I used a sound card to play math generated test tones through a power amp into a resister in series with a reactive component (woofer, inductor, capacitor, crossover network, etc...) and record the signal right off the terminals of the device to measure freq. vs. voltage (to calculate impedance). I used this to measure all kinds of things including a woofer's T/S parameters and box effects (port freq.)

There are no passive crossover parts inside these speakers, But I have made quite a few multi-way systems that are driven by a single power amp channel.

James.

[Things]

Just throwin it in here, but Altium freakin rocks

[tadawson]

It looks like any Eagle 6.0 or abobe was linked to glibc 2.9 - I'm at 2.8 . . . I may have to suppress the gag reflex and load it up on Winblowz . .

- Tim

[james]

Oh dear!

Why not just update your GCC libs?

You know multiple versions can co-exist on the same system. Right?

You could also try running it from within a recent bootable "live" CD or DVD Linux distro.

When you get it up and going, let me know. I tweaked the design just a tad. Actually, I could start all over with the board part and do a slightly better job, now that I see what it looks like.

James.

[tadawson]

I loaded up on another Linux box cleanly . . . and yes, while you can run two lib versions, that also doubles shared lib memory utilization, and drags you down . . . and some things are not clean after outright upgrades (not to mention, not sure if the newer libs will even compile), so not sure it's worth it, since Eagle 5.x still meets my needs . . .


Having said that, looks pretty good . . . I usually put labels in the tnames layer, not the trace layer where yours are, but that is a nuance. I can't either recall correct operation of the CAM procesor (or it has changed) to output a gerber file that I can view to verify (yet . . . ) but still working on it. I also typically use the component names layer, not values. Oh, and the CAM processor is griping that the drill layer was not selected, which may cause you to get an undrilled board . . . not much of any reason to turn off the default layers, at least as I see it.

- Tim

[james]

Like I said, I'm a noob at PCB fab!

Would you like to Skype some time?

I'm james_laserboy.

I'd like to learn how to do this right and collect all the right software to do it.

James.

[masterpj]

I currently use eagle myself.
I love it myself because it's so widely used/supported and there is a big community following for it too I believe *makemagazine refers to it a lot and jeremy blum has some straightforward tutorials on how to get started*..
I have yet to come to a gerber creation issue.

[CountFunkula]

Eagle for most things (75% of the time), Altium if I am working on a design with BGA components and/or if I need really tight integration with the mechanical design. There are things I really love and REALLY hate about both packages.