On Wed, 17 Sep 2014 19:52:42 -0400, wrote:

On Wed, 17 Sep 2014 03:00:04 -0400, rickman wrote:

On 9/17/2014 2:25 AM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
In sci.electronics.repair John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 16 Sep 2014 03:02:11 -0400, rickman wrote:

On 9/16/2014 1:58 AM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
In sci.electronics.repair Don Kuenz wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=...ess+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

This:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...breadboard.jpg

It's a Dolby SR prototype of some sort.

Yeah, like I said, I always do PCB from the start. This one just has a
few more white wires than usual. Good thing he had all those
conveniently located vias. lol

Yeah, a real PCB could have been done faster than making that by hand.
And you could order 5 of them. If this was Dolby, the cost of a
quick-turn multilayer board would be trivial.

I'd cut them slack (and give some credit too) considering how old that
thing is. It's actually pretty cool. I had some 70s/early 80s
"Sega/Gremlin" arcade machine boards that all appeared to have been layed
out by hand with vinyl decals. Every single trace. boards and boards of
74xx series logic circling a z80 or something like that, all done by hand.
These were production boards, but somebody spend lots of time designing
those boards. Not sure what sort of board layout tools they had back then,
although they must have existed. Anybody know?

Yeah, PCB layout back then was supported by... I can't think of the name
of the company that made those pads and strips.

Brady?

And Chart-Pack. But the really good ones were made by Bishop Graphics.
The Bishop people were real SOBs; their prices were outrageous and
they'd show up and tell you that your decals wouldn't be shipped
unless you ordered your blueprint supplies from them too.

Peple happily dumped them when CAD got affordable.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

On 9/17/2014 10:46 PM, josephkk wrote:
On Wed, 17 Sep 2014 06:25:08 +0000 (UTC), Cydrome Leader
wrote:

In sci.electronics.repair John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 16 Sep 2014 03:02:11 -0400, rickman wrote:

On 9/16/2014 1:58 AM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
In sci.electronics.repair Don Kuenz wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=...ess+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

This:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...breadboard.jpg

It's a Dolby SR prototype of some sort.

Yeah, like I said, I always do PCB from the start. This one just has a
few more white wires than usual. Good thing he had all those
conveniently located vias. lol

Yeah, a real PCB could have been done faster than making that by hand.
And you could order 5 of them. If this was Dolby, the cost of a
quick-turn multilayer board would be trivial.

I'd cut them slack (and give some credit too) considering how old that
thing is. It's actually pretty cool. I had some 70s/early 80s
"Sega/Gremlin" arcade machine boards that all appeared to have been layed
out by hand with vinyl decals. Every single trace. boards and boards of
74xx series logic circling a z80 or something like that, all done by hand.
These were production boards, but somebody spend lots of time designing
those boards. Not sure what sort of board layout tools they had back then,
although they must have existed. Anybody know?

In the late 1960s i remember ICS, Daisy and Mentor systems that would do
board layout. Rather expensive though, about %50K for the base
workstation (often 2901 based) as much more for the software, another
chunk $70k for the photo plotter (Gerber compatible).

Are you sure about your timeframe? Was the 2901 even around in the late
60's?

Wikipedia - "Am2900 is a family of integrated circuits (ICs) created in
1975 by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)."

I think CAD for anyone but the really large companies didn't happen
until nearly 1980 give or take a couple of years. We had a couple of
68000 based workstations in 1985 and I remember they made a 2901
software compatible version which ran twice as fast, which still wasn't
much. I started some sort of run and I recall it had to run overnight.
Then some idiot came in and pressed a key which kills your process.
What a stupid key to have on a keyboard.

--

Rick

On 9/17/2014 1:48 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 09/17/2014 12:02 PM, John S wrote:
On 9/16/2014 11:17 PM, Robert Baer wrote:
Don Kuenz wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=...ess+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

TIA.

--
Don Kuenz
Haven't we been thru this garbage before recently?


Yeah. But, is anyone interested in the way I do it? It's slightly
different from the rest of the posts.

I don't know. Are you good at it? All wisdom welcome!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I bought several sizes of diamond core drill bits that sand away copper
so that it leaves an isolated circular island of copper. On my (properly
adjusted) drill press, I can make lots of little islands of various
sizes on blank FR4 and use them for connection points. I use JL's
method of the Dremmel to make a VCC strip at a convenient edge and
solder bypass caps across the gap.

I've not found any problems with this method, but I'm not the SHF guru
you guys are.

On 18/09/14 12:47, John S wrote:
On 9/17/2014 1:48 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 09/17/2014 12:02 PM, John S wrote:
On 9/16/2014 11:17 PM, Robert Baer wrote:
Don Kuenz wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=...ess+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

TIA.

--
Don Kuenz
Haven't we been thru this garbage before recently?


Yeah. But, is anyone interested in the way I do it? It's slightly
different from the rest of the posts.

I don't know. Are you good at it? All wisdom welcome!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I bought several sizes of diamond core drill bits that sand away copper so that it leaves an isolated circular island of copper. On my (properly adjusted) drill press, I can make lots of little
islands of various sizes on blank FR4 and use them for connection points. I use JL's method of the Dremmel to make a VCC strip at a convenient edge and solder bypass caps across the gap.

I've not found any problems with this method, but I'm not the SHF guru you guys are.

There used to be stick-on "pcb tracks" that were used for RF work. They
looked like 1.6mm single sided PCB say 0.25" wide and 6" long with a
single track just wide enough to form a 50ohm transmission line when the
PCB was stuck onto a ground plane.

Chopping them into squares obviously gives an ad-hoc isolated "pad" that
can be stuck wherever convenient.

Do these still exist, and what's the name?

On 9/18/2014 6:47 AM, John S wrote:
On 9/17/2014 1:48 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 09/17/2014 12:02 PM, John S wrote:
On 9/16/2014 11:17 PM, Robert Baer wrote:
Don Kuenz wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=...ess+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

TIA.

--
Don Kuenz
Haven't we been thru this garbage before recently?


Yeah. But, is anyone interested in the way I do it? It's slightly
different from the rest of the posts.

I don't know. Are you good at it? All wisdom welcome!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I bought several sizes of diamond core drill bits that sand away copper
so that it leaves an isolated circular island of copper. On my (properly
adjusted) drill press, I can make lots of little islands of various
sizes on blank FR4 and use them for connection points. I use JL's
method of the Dremmel to make a VCC strip at a convenient edge and
solder bypass caps across the gap.

I've not found any problems with this method, but I'm not the SHF guru
you guys are.

Here is what mine look like:

http://www.ebay.com/sch/diamond%20core%20drill%20bit

On Wed, 17 Sep 2014 19:49:01 -0700, John Larkin
wrote:

On Wed, 17 Sep 2014 19:52:42 -0400, wrote:

On Wed, 17 Sep 2014 03:00:04 -0400, rickman wrote:

On 9/17/2014 2:25 AM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
In sci.electronics.repair John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 16 Sep 2014 03:02:11 -0400, rickman wrote:

On 9/16/2014 1:58 AM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
In sci.electronics.repair Don Kuenz wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=...ess+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

This:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...breadboard.jpg

It's a Dolby SR prototype of some sort.

Yeah, like I said, I always do PCB from the start. This one just has a
few more white wires than usual. Good thing he had all those
conveniently located vias. lol

Yeah, a real PCB could have been done faster than making that by hand.
And you could order 5 of them. If this was Dolby, the cost of a
quick-turn multilayer board would be trivial.

I'd cut them slack (and give some credit too) considering how old that
thing is. It's actually pretty cool. I had some 70s/early 80s
"Sega/Gremlin" arcade machine boards that all appeared to have been layed
out by hand with vinyl decals. Every single trace. boards and boards of
74xx series logic circling a z80 or something like that, all done by hand.
These were production boards, but somebody spend lots of time designing
those boards. Not sure what sort of board layout tools they had back then,
although they must have existed. Anybody know?

Yeah, PCB layout back then was supported by... I can't think of the name
of the company that made those pads and strips.

Brady?

And Chart-Pack. But the really good ones were made by Bishop Graphics.
The Bishop people were real SOBs; their prices were outrageous and
they'd show up and tell you that your decals wouldn't be shipped
unless you ordered your blueprint supplies from them too.

Peple happily dumped them when CAD got affordable.

I've still got a drawer full of Bishop Graphics and
Chart-Pack stuff, with DIPs in 2x and 4x sizes. (I'm saving
'em for "collector's items". Now all I have to do is find
the right collector...)

In the Good Old Days, you'd make a scaled-up layout on
mylar, then take it to a professional photography place with
a "process camera": a huge bellows-type camera mounted on
rails, with a lens about 6 inches in diameter. Then for a
mere $50-100 they'd do a reduction to 1x that you could use
to expose your silk screens for production. High tech!

Best regards,


Bob Masta

DAQARTA v7.60
Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis
www.daqarta.com
Scope, Spectrum, Spectrogram, Sound Level Meter
Frequency Counter, Pitch Track, Pitch-to-MIDI
FREE Signal Generator, DaqMusiq generator
Science with your sound card!

On 09/18/2014 07:47 AM, John S wrote:
On 9/17/2014 1:48 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 09/17/2014 12:02 PM, John S wrote:
On 9/16/2014 11:17 PM, Robert Baer wrote:
Don Kuenz wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=...ess+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

TIA.

--
Don Kuenz
Haven't we been thru this garbage before recently?


Yeah. But, is anyone interested in the way I do it? It's slightly
different from the rest of the posts.

I don't know. Are you good at it? All wisdom welcome!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I bought several sizes of diamond core drill bits that sand away copper
so that it leaves an isolated circular island of copper. On my (properly
adjusted) drill press, I can make lots of little islands of various
sizes on blank FR4 and use them for connection points. I use JL's
method of the Dremmel to make a VCC strip at a convenient edge and
solder bypass caps across the gap.

I've not found any problems with this method, but I'm not the SHF guru
you guys are.



Well, 'guru' is a bit strong to describe my microwave skills, at least.
I mostly use microwave transistors at much lower frequency, because
some of them have remarkable properties, like effectively infinite Early
voltage or 300-pV 1-Hz noise. Response out to 20 GHz is a bug rather
than a feature in that sort of use, sort of like an audio amp with
response out to a megahertz.

It's all about finding the right ferrite bead to knock their bandwidth
down to something vaguely reasonable. Murata BLM18BA and BB are good.

Occasionally I've made DIY stripboards for SC70ish parts, using several
Dremel cutoff discs mounted on one arbor, with nylon washers in between.
Gets old pretty fast.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs



--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

On Thu, 18 Sep 2014 12:40:52 GMT, (Bob Masta)
wrote:

On Wed, 17 Sep 2014 19:49:01 -0700, John Larkin
wrote:

On Wed, 17 Sep 2014 19:52:42 -0400, wrote:

On Wed, 17 Sep 2014 03:00:04 -0400, rickman wrote:

On 9/17/2014 2:25 AM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
In sci.electronics.repair John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 16 Sep 2014 03:02:11 -0400, rickman wrote:

On 9/16/2014 1:58 AM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
In sci.electronics.repair Don Kuenz wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=...ess+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

This:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...breadboard.jpg

It's a Dolby SR prototype of some sort.

Yeah, like I said, I always do PCB from the start. This one just has a
few more white wires than usual. Good thing he had all those
conveniently located vias. lol

Yeah, a real PCB could have been done faster than making that by hand.
And you could order 5 of them. If this was Dolby, the cost of a
quick-turn multilayer board would be trivial.

I'd cut them slack (and give some credit too) considering how old that
thing is. It's actually pretty cool. I had some 70s/early 80s
"Sega/Gremlin" arcade machine boards that all appeared to have been layed
out by hand with vinyl decals. Every single trace. boards and boards of
74xx series logic circling a z80 or something like that, all done by hand.
These were production boards, but somebody spend lots of time designing
those boards. Not sure what sort of board layout tools they had back then,
although they must have existed. Anybody know?

Yeah, PCB layout back then was supported by... I can't think of the name
of the company that made those pads and strips.

Brady?

And Chart-Pack. But the really good ones were made by Bishop Graphics.
The Bishop people were real SOBs; their prices were outrageous and
they'd show up and tell you that your decals wouldn't be shipped
unless you ordered your blueprint supplies from them too.

Peple happily dumped them when CAD got affordable.

I've still got a drawer full of Bishop Graphics and
Chart-Pack stuff, with DIPs in 2x and 4x sizes. (I'm saving
'em for "collector's items". Now all I have to do is find
the right collector...)

In the Good Old Days, you'd make a scaled-up layout on
mylar, then take it to a professional photography place with
a "process camera": a huge bellows-type camera mounted on
rails, with a lens about 6 inches in diameter. Then for a
mere $50-100 they'd do a reduction to 1x that you could use
to expose your silk screens for production. High tech!

Best regards,


Bob Masta

DAQARTA v7.60
Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis
www.daqarta.com
Scope, Spectrum, Spectrogram, Sound Level Meter
Frequency Counter, Pitch Track, Pitch-to-MIDI
FREE Signal Generator, DaqMusiq generator
Science with your sound card!

Every city had a few shops with cameras like that, but they mostly did
work for print shops, for newspapers and print flyers and such. They
couldn't do PCB artwork photography because they couldn't hold the
tolerances and didn't know the process tricks, like making ground
planes from padmasters. Here in the SF area, Lorry Ray was the best.
When I worked in New Orleans nobody was any good so we had to make our
own camera, which was literally two rooms with a lens in the wall
between them, big tracks for the art and the film.

The Big Easy: good food, good times, bad tolerances.





--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

On Thu, 18 Sep 2014 06:47:34 -0500, John S
wrote:

On 9/17/2014 1:48 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 09/17/2014 12:02 PM, John S wrote:
On 9/16/2014 11:17 PM, Robert Baer wrote:
Don Kuenz wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=...ess+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

TIA.

--
Don Kuenz
Haven't we been thru this garbage before recently?


Yeah. But, is anyone interested in the way I do it? It's slightly
different from the rest of the posts.

I don't know. Are you good at it? All wisdom welcome!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I bought several sizes of diamond core drill bits that sand away copper
so that it leaves an isolated circular island of copper. On my (properly
adjusted) drill press, I can make lots of little islands of various
sizes on blank FR4 and use them for connection points. I use JL's
method of the Dremmel to make a VCC strip at a convenient edge and
solder bypass caps across the gap.

I've not found any problems with this method, but I'm not the SHF guru
you guys are.


I use carbide dental burrs in a Dremel, freehand, to cut away copper.

You can also put down Kapton tape and then copper tape patterns. Kinda
low impedance.

I occasionally use the old metal shear to make a collection of narrow
FR strips, as power busses and junction islands. They can be
crazy-glued onto the copperclad ground plane.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...Z316_Proto.JPG



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

On 18/09/14 15:15, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 18 Sep 2014 06:47:34 -0500, John S
wrote:

On 9/17/2014 1:48 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 09/17/2014 12:02 PM, John S wrote:
On 9/16/2014 11:17 PM, Robert Baer wrote:
Don Kuenz wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=...ess+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

TIA.

--
Don Kuenz
Haven't we been thru this garbage before recently?


Yeah. But, is anyone interested in the way I do it? It's slightly
different from the rest of the posts.

I don't know. Are you good at it? All wisdom welcome!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I bought several sizes of diamond core drill bits that sand away copper
so that it leaves an isolated circular island of copper. On my (properly
adjusted) drill press, I can make lots of little islands of various
sizes on blank FR4 and use them for connection points. I use JL's
method of the Dremmel to make a VCC strip at a convenient edge and
solder bypass caps across the gap.

I've not found any problems with this method, but I'm not the SHF guru
you guys are.


I use carbide dental burrs in a Dremel, freehand, to cut away copper.

You can also put down Kapton tape and then copper tape patterns. Kinda
low impedance.

I occasionally use the old metal shear to make a collection of narrow
FR strips, as power busses and junction islands. They can be
crazy-glued onto the copperclad ground plane.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...Z316_Proto.JPG

These used to be (?still are?) available commercially, but
with the track geometry chosen so they were 50 ohms transmission
line when above a suitable ground plane.Very simple and convenient
when making simple GHz notch filters to remove harmonics.

Anyone remember the name?

(Curiously I made a trivial dead-bug circuit like this yesterday.
Synchrotonicity rules).

On 2014-09-18 16:28, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 18/09/14 15:15, John Larkin wrote:
[...]
I occasionally use the old metal shear to make a collection of narrow
FR strips, as power busses and junction islands. They can be
crazy-glued onto the copperclad ground plane.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...Z316_Proto.JPG

These used to be (?still are?) available commercially, but
with the track geometry chosen so they were 50 ohms transmission
line when above a suitable ground plane.Very simple and convenient
when making simple GHz notch filters to remove harmonics.

Anyone remember the name?

Wainwright, probably. No longer around.

Jeroen Belleman

"Don Kuenz" wrote in message
...
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=...ess+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

For simple stuff, there's little to beat "dead bug" style.

There's any number of variants like hybrids between dead bug and the
Manhattan and/or ugly styles favoured by some hams.

Whenever the design involves bolt on power devices, these provide some of
the soldering points for everything else. Typically I'd use existing holes
in a salvaged pressed sheet heatsink, punched out PCB blanks can be glued on
for more solder points. Sometimes I've even been known to use tagboard for
really basic stuff, small sub-assemblies on stripboard can be glued edgeways
to the ali plate or secured with mounting bolts/spacers.

Basically - I just use whatever's ready to hand.

On 18/09/14 15:49, Jeroen Belleman wrote:
On 2014-09-18 16:28, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 18/09/14 15:15, John Larkin wrote:
[...]
I occasionally use the old metal shear to make a collection of narrow
FR strips, as power busses and junction islands. They can be
crazy-glued onto the copperclad ground plane.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...Z316_Proto.JPG

These used to be (?still are?) available commercially, but
with the track geometry chosen so they were 50 ohms transmission
line when above a suitable ground plane.Very simple and convenient
when making simple GHz notch filters to remove harmonics.

Anyone remember the name?

Wainwright, probably. No longer around.

Ah yes, that's it; thanks.

Googling for wainwright brings up other names that rings a
bell: "minimounts" and "soldermount", plus a few pictures
confirming it.

http://www.wd5gnr.com/foil.htm
notes
"use copper foil tape from any stained glass supply house
to form conductors like you would on a PC board. The tape
is dirt cheap, has an adhesive backing, and is designed
to take heat. You can cut the foil with scissors or an
X-Acto knife,"

so that could probably be used on the plain side of
single-sided PCB

In sci.electronics.design John S wrote:
On 9/18/2014 6:47 AM, John S wrote:
On 9/17/2014 1:48 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 09/17/2014 12:02 PM, John S wrote:
On 9/16/2014 11:17 PM, Robert Baer wrote:
Don Kuenz wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=...ess+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

TIA.

--
Don Kuenz
Haven't we been thru this garbage before recently?


Yeah. But, is anyone interested in the way I do it? It's slightly
different from the rest of the posts.

I don't know. Are you good at it? All wisdom welcome!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I bought several sizes of diamond core drill bits that sand away copper
so that it leaves an isolated circular island of copper. On my (properly
adjusted) drill press, I can make lots of little islands of various
sizes on blank FR4 and use them for connection points. I use JL's
method of the Dremmel to make a VCC strip at a convenient edge and
solder bypass caps across the gap.

I've not found any problems with this method, but I'm not the SHF guru
you guys are.

Here is what mine look like:

http://www.ebay.com/sch/diamond%20core%20drill%20bit

And here's a ten piece set http://tinyurl.com/n7xpljr

Thank you. Carving islands is a great idea! Because some say that the
heat from a solder gun can cause bonded islands to break loose.

Here's my breadboarding options so far, from best to worst.

Spin a board

Wire wrap or perf board

dead bug or Manhattan

nylon breadboard or strip board

--
Don Kuenz

On 9/18/2014 12:22 PM, Don Kuenz wrote:
In sci.electronics.design John S wrote:
On 9/18/2014 6:47 AM, John S wrote:
On 9/17/2014 1:48 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 09/17/2014 12:02 PM, John S wrote:
On 9/16/2014 11:17 PM, Robert Baer wrote:
Don Kuenz wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=...ess+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

TIA.

--
Don Kuenz
Haven't we been thru this garbage before recently?


Yeah. But, is anyone interested in the way I do it? It's slightly
different from the rest of the posts.

I don't know. Are you good at it? All wisdom welcome!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I bought several sizes of diamond core drill bits that sand away copper
so that it leaves an isolated circular island of copper. On my (properly
adjusted) drill press, I can make lots of little islands of various
sizes on blank FR4 and use them for connection points. I use JL's
method of the Dremmel to make a VCC strip at a convenient edge and
solder bypass caps across the gap.

I've not found any problems with this method, but I'm not the SHF guru
you guys are.

Here is what mine look like:

http://www.ebay.com/sch/diamond%20core%20drill%20bit

And here's a ten piece set http://tinyurl.com/n7xpljr

Thank you. Carving islands is a great idea! Because some say that the
heat from a solder gun can cause bonded islands to break loose.

Here's my breadboarding options so far, from best to worst.

Spin a board

Wire wrap or perf board

dead bug or Manhattan

nylon breadboard or strip board

--
Don Kuenz

Even better. At that price, I might get a more complete set. Thanks for
the lead.

On Wednesday, September 17, 2014 12:00:04 AM UTC-7, rickman wrote:

Yeah, PCB layout back then was supported by... I can't think of the name
of the company that made those pads and strips. They made them with
scale factors so you could more easily see what you were doing, 2x and
4x that I recall.

Bishop Graphics was the big outfit.

I can dimly recall doing some layouts of small items on MacPaint (it had
pixel-level draw, and copy/paste, so it was a lot like decal/tape composition).
There had to be an accurate copy camera or at least Xerox, to get the
artwork at 1:1

rickman wrote:
On 9/17/2014 2:25 AM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
In sci.electronics.repair John Larkin
wrote:
On Tue, 16 Sep 2014 03:02:11 -0400, rickman wrote:

On 9/16/2014 1:58 AM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
In sci.electronics.repair Don Kuenz wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=...ess+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

This:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...breadboard.jpg


It's a Dolby SR prototype of some sort.

Yeah, like I said, I always do PCB from the start. This one just has a
few more white wires than usual. Good thing he had all those
conveniently located vias. lol

Yeah, a real PCB could have been done faster than making that by hand.
And you could order 5 of them. If this was Dolby, the cost of a
quick-turn multilayer board would be trivial.

I'd cut them slack (and give some credit too) considering how old that
thing is. It's actually pretty cool. I had some 70s/early 80s
"Sega/Gremlin" arcade machine boards that all appeared to have been layed
out by hand with vinyl decals. Every single trace. boards and boards of
74xx series logic circling a z80 or something like that, all done by
hand.
These were production boards, but somebody spend lots of time designing
those boards. Not sure what sort of board layout tools they had back
then,
although they must have existed. Anybody know?

Yeah, PCB layout back then was supported by... I can't think of the name
of the company that made those pads and strips. They made them with
scale factors so you could more easily see what you were doing, 2x and
4x that I recall. You set your design rules by picking the tape width
and the pad diameter. If you were a little tight and wanted to shave a
little off a pad... you shaved a little off a pad. lol

I didn't do layout then, but I've seen the artwork. Xacto knives are
your friends even if it is just for picking up the tracks and pads and
placing them.

I don't think CAD systems were used much even for layout until around
the time the PC hit the scene. I guess the big companies had them...
with "huge" 20" CRTs and light pens most likely. Don't know for sure.

Check; i think the company name began with a "C"; they had a variety
of tapes: black, transparent red, transparent blue; and many DIP
patterns (round pad and oval pad).

John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 17 Sep 2014 06:25:08 +0000 (UTC), Cydrome Leader
wrote:

In sci.electronics.repair John wrote:
On Tue, 16 Sep 2014 03:02:11 -0400, wrote:

On 9/16/2014 1:58 AM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
In sci.electronics.repair Don wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=...ess+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

This:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...breadboard.jpg

It's a Dolby SR prototype of some sort.

Yeah, like I said, I always do PCB from the start. This one just has a
few more white wires than usual. Good thing he had all those
conveniently located vias. lol

Yeah, a real PCB could have been done faster than making that by hand.
And you could order 5 of them. If this was Dolby, the cost of a
quick-turn multilayer board would be trivial.

I'd cut them slack (and give some credit too) considering how old that
thing is. It's actually pretty cool. I had some 70s/early 80s
"Sega/Gremlin" arcade machine boards that all appeared to have been layed
out by hand with vinyl decals. Every single trace. boards and boards of
74xx series logic circling a z80 or something like that, all done by hand.
These were production boards, but somebody spend lots of time designing
those boards. Not sure what sort of board layout tools they had back then,
although they must have existed. Anybody know?

I used to lay out my own boards, decals and black crepe tape on
pin-aligned mylar. There would be a padmaster (pads only) and a
separate sheet for each trace layer. We sent it out to Lorry Ray in
Mountain View to be photographed. They could also do cool ground plane
tricks, all with wet photography. We'd send the film out to the fab
house and expect to get it back.

I still have a few layouts around, to show the kids. It was labor
intensive.


(Around here, a lot of the people that you interview have worked for
Dolby. Turnover seems pretty high. They are like ILM, expecting people
to work for glory.)

Has Dolby done anything new or interesting in the past decade?

Big sound systems for movie theatres (a dying biz) and a new home 3D
sound system.


At the abusive prices it is no wonder that movie theaters are going
out of biz.

On 9/18/2014 11:18 PM, Robert Baer wrote:
rickman wrote:
On 9/17/2014 2:25 AM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
In sci.electronics.repair John Larkin
wrote:
On Tue, 16 Sep 2014 03:02:11 -0400, rickman wrote:

On 9/16/2014 1:58 AM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
In sci.electronics.repair Don Kuenz wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=...ess+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

This:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...breadboard.jpg



It's a Dolby SR prototype of some sort.

Yeah, like I said, I always do PCB from the start. This one just has a
few more white wires than usual. Good thing he had all those
conveniently located vias. lol

Yeah, a real PCB could have been done faster than making that by hand.
And you could order 5 of them. If this was Dolby, the cost of a
quick-turn multilayer board would be trivial.

I'd cut them slack (and give some credit too) considering how old that
thing is. It's actually pretty cool. I had some 70s/early 80s
"Sega/Gremlin" arcade machine boards that all appeared to have been
layed
out by hand with vinyl decals. Every single trace. boards and boards of
74xx series logic circling a z80 or something like that, all done by
hand.
These were production boards, but somebody spend lots of time designing
those boards. Not sure what sort of board layout tools they had back
then,
although they must have existed. Anybody know?

Yeah, PCB layout back then was supported by... I can't think of the name
of the company that made those pads and strips. They made them with
scale factors so you could more easily see what you were doing, 2x and
4x that I recall. You set your design rules by picking the tape width
and the pad diameter. If you were a little tight and wanted to shave a
little off a pad... you shaved a little off a pad. lol

I didn't do layout then, but I've seen the artwork. Xacto knives are
your friends even if it is just for picking up the tracks and pads and
placing them.

I don't think CAD systems were used much even for layout until around
the time the PC hit the scene. I guess the big companies had them...
with "huge" 20" CRTs and light pens most likely. Don't know for sure.

Check; i think the company name began with a "C"; they had a variety
of tapes: black, transparent red, transparent blue; and many DIP
patterns (round pad and oval pad).

I think someone said Bishop which seems to ring a bell. That was what,
40 years ago? It could be anything and I likely wouldn't remember. I
do remember they seemed rather pricey... but then I'm a famous tightwad.
That's why I'm still looking for that $400 USB mixed signal 250 MHz
oscilloscope. lol

--

Rick

On 9/18/2014 11:23 PM, Robert Baer wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 17 Sep 2014 06:25:08 +0000 (UTC), Cydrome Leader
wrote:

Has Dolby done anything new or interesting in the past decade?

Big sound systems for movie theatres (a dying biz) and a new home 3D
sound system.


At the abusive prices it is no wonder that movie theaters are going
out of biz.

I've been plenty wrong about trends before, but I don't think movie
theaters will go under like video stores. Much of the movie theater
experience is not duplicated by home theaters no matter how good they
are. For the younger crowd, who is the bulk of the patrons, a lot of it
is just getting out and about.

But then I didn't think many would be willing to pay $40+ a month for a
cell phone when a house phone could be half that price... lol

--

Rick

On 17/09/14 07:25, Cydrome Leader wrote:
In sci.electronics.repair John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 16 Sep 2014 03:02:11 -0400, rickman wrote:

On 9/16/2014 1:58 AM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
In sci.electronics.repair Don Kuenz wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=...ess+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

This:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...breadboard.jpg

It's a Dolby SR prototype of some sort.

Yeah, like I said, I always do PCB from the start. This one just has a
few more white wires than usual. Good thing he had all those
conveniently located vias. lol

Yeah, a real PCB could have been done faster than making that by hand.
And you could order 5 of them. If this was Dolby, the cost of a
quick-turn multilayer board would be trivial.

I'd cut them slack (and give some credit too) considering how old that
thing is. It's actually pretty cool. I had some 70s/early 80s
"Sega/Gremlin" arcade machine boards that all appeared to have been layed
out by hand with vinyl decals. Every single trace. boards and boards of
74xx series logic circling a z80 or something like that, all done by hand.
These were production boards, but somebody spend lots of time designing
those boards. Not sure what sort of board layout tools they had back then,
although they must have existed. Anybody know?

Back in the 70s people used blue and red tape taped out on the
same side of the same piece of plastic sheet, typically at 2:1
scale. The blue was the top copper, the red was the bottom
copper (or vv?!). It was projected through coloured filters
onto the light-sensitive etch resist.

Four layer boards? No.
Poured copper areas? Tedious.
Lifting a blue track layed under a red track? expletive deleted

On Thu, 18 Sep 2014 06:47:34 -0500, John S
wrote:

On 9/17/2014 1:48 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 09/17/2014 12:02 PM, John S wrote:
On 9/16/2014 11:17 PM, Robert Baer wrote:
Don Kuenz wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=...ess+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

TIA.

--
Don Kuenz
Haven't we been thru this garbage before recently?


Yeah. But, is anyone interested in the way I do it? It's slightly
different from the rest of the posts.

I don't know. Are you good at it? All wisdom welcome!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I bought several sizes of diamond core drill bits that sand away copper
so that it leaves an isolated circular island of copper. On my (properly
adjusted) drill press, I can make lots of little islands of various
sizes on blank FR4 and use them for connection points. I use JL's
method of the Dremmel to make a VCC strip at a convenient edge and
solder bypass caps across the gap.

I've not found any problems with this method, but I'm not the SHF guru
you guys are.

If you get carbide-ball-tipped dental burrs from a dental
supply house, you can even use them free-hand in your
Dremel. The shanks are steel and handle plenty of side load
for carving... about anything short of dropping the Dremel
tip-down.

The tips themselves will last forever; the only ones I've
lost were by (ahem!) dropping the Dremel. I made a simple
metal sleeve to slip over the end of the Dremel to protect
the tip when not in use, and that's pretty much solved the
problem.

Dental burrs are fine for drilling use as well, but you can
only do one board at a time due to the tapered shank leading
to the ball tip.

Best regards,


Bob Masta

DAQARTA v7.60
Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis
www.daqarta.com
Scope, Spectrum, Spectrogram, Sound Level Meter
Frequency Counter, Pitch Track, Pitch-to-MIDI
FREE Signal Generator, DaqMusiq generator
Science with your sound card!

On Fri, 19 Sep 2014 11:14:09 +0100, Tom Gardner
wrote:

On 17/09/14 07:25, Cydrome Leader wrote:
In sci.electronics.repair John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 16 Sep 2014 03:02:11 -0400, rickman wrote:

On 9/16/2014 1:58 AM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
In sci.electronics.repair Don Kuenz wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=...ess+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

This:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...breadboard.jpg

It's a Dolby SR prototype of some sort.

Yeah, like I said, I always do PCB from the start. This one just has a
few more white wires than usual. Good thing he had all those
conveniently located vias. lol

Yeah, a real PCB could have been done faster than making that by hand.
And you could order 5 of them. If this was Dolby, the cost of a
quick-turn multilayer board would be trivial.

I'd cut them slack (and give some credit too) considering how old that
thing is. It's actually pretty cool. I had some 70s/early 80s
"Sega/Gremlin" arcade machine boards that all appeared to have been layed
out by hand with vinyl decals. Every single trace. boards and boards of
74xx series logic circling a z80 or something like that, all done by hand.
These were production boards, but somebody spend lots of time designing
those boards. Not sure what sort of board layout tools they had back then,
although they must have existed. Anybody know?

Back in the 70s people used blue and red tape taped out on the
same side of the same piece of plastic sheet, typically at 2:1
scale. The blue was the top copper, the red was the bottom
copper (or vv?!). It was projected through coloured filters
onto the light-sensitive etch resist.

Or, more often, reduced 2:1 to B+W film to make the boards. The PCB
resist (usually KPR) was UV sensitive.

I didn't like the color stuff. It was hard to "edit" a layout, and the
color separation photography didn't work well. We could do tricks to
burn assembly and fab drawings when each layer was its own mylar,
which didn't work with colored tape.



Four layer boards? No.

Sure, we did those.

Poured copper areas? Tedious.

Cut from Rubylith with an x-acto. That was as fast as CAD.

Lorry Ray could make a ground plane, or power pours, from the
padmaster mylar, using some photographic tricks.

Early ICs were designed with Rubylith and x-acto knives. People didn't
have metric rulers handy, so someone decided that there were 25 mm to
the inch.


Lifting a blue track layed under a red track? expletive deleted

That's why we had a sheet of mylar for each trace layer.

The real annoyance of hand-taped PCB layout was checking. Checking
clearances and connectivity of a serious layout would take two people
two days. Now it takes seconds.

I still draw a lot, mechanical sketches and schematics. It's much more
intuitive to me than using a screen. I have minions who CAD my stuff
for me.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

On Fri, 19 Sep 2014 12:06:58 GMT, (Bob Masta)
wrote:

On Thu, 18 Sep 2014 06:47:34 -0500, John S
wrote:

On 9/17/2014 1:48 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 09/17/2014 12:02 PM, John S wrote:
On 9/16/2014 11:17 PM, Robert Baer wrote:
Don Kuenz wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=...ess+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

TIA.

--
Don Kuenz
Haven't we been thru this garbage before recently?


Yeah. But, is anyone interested in the way I do it? It's slightly
different from the rest of the posts.

I don't know. Are you good at it? All wisdom welcome!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I bought several sizes of diamond core drill bits that sand away copper
so that it leaves an isolated circular island of copper. On my (properly
adjusted) drill press, I can make lots of little islands of various
sizes on blank FR4 and use them for connection points. I use JL's
method of the Dremmel to make a VCC strip at a convenient edge and
solder bypass caps across the gap.

I've not found any problems with this method, but I'm not the SHF guru
you guys are.

If you get carbide-ball-tipped dental burrs from a dental
supply house,

Under $1 each on ebay.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...tos/Burr_1.JPG


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

On 9/19/2014 10:38 AM, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 19 Sep 2014 12:06:58 GMT, (Bob Masta)
wrote:

On Thu, 18 Sep 2014 06:47:34 -0500, John S
wrote:

On 9/17/2014 1:48 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 09/17/2014 12:02 PM, John S wrote:
On 9/16/2014 11:17 PM, Robert Baer wrote:
Don Kuenz wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=...ess+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

TIA.

--
Don Kuenz
Haven't we been thru this garbage before recently?


Yeah. But, is anyone interested in the way I do it? It's slightly
different from the rest of the posts.

I don't know. Are you good at it? All wisdom welcome!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I bought several sizes of diamond core drill bits that sand away copper
so that it leaves an isolated circular island of copper. On my (properly
adjusted) drill press, I can make lots of little islands of various
sizes on blank FR4 and use them for connection points. I use JL's
method of the Dremmel to make a VCC strip at a convenient edge and
solder bypass caps across the gap.

I've not found any problems with this method, but I'm not the SHF guru
you guys are.

If you get carbide-ball-tipped dental burrs from a dental
supply house,

Under $1 each on ebay.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...tos/Burr_1.JPG

Free for me. My partner's daughter and her husband are dentists.

I still draw a lot, mechanical sketches and schematics. It's much more
intuitive to me than using a screen. I have minions who CAD my stuff
for me.



I agree absolutely about hand drawn, its perfect free form and so user
friendly. But no minions I'm afraid :-(

On Thu, 18 Sep 2014 20:23:03 -0700, Robert Baer
wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 17 Sep 2014 06:25:08 +0000 (UTC), Cydrome Leader
wrote:

In sci.electronics.repair John wrote:
On Tue, 16 Sep 2014 03:02:11 -0400, wrote:

On 9/16/2014 1:58 AM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
In sci.electronics.repair Don wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=...ess+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

This:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...breadboard.jpg

It's a Dolby SR prototype of some sort.

Yeah, like I said, I always do PCB from the start. This one just has a
few more white wires than usual. Good thing he had all those
conveniently located vias. lol

Yeah, a real PCB could have been done faster than making that by hand.
And you could order 5 of them. If this was Dolby, the cost of a
quick-turn multilayer board would be trivial.

I'd cut them slack (and give some credit too) considering how old that
thing is. It's actually pretty cool. I had some 70s/early 80s
"Sega/Gremlin" arcade machine boards that all appeared to have been layed
out by hand with vinyl decals. Every single trace. boards and boards of
74xx series logic circling a z80 or something like that, all done by hand.
These were production boards, but somebody spend lots of time designing
those boards. Not sure what sort of board layout tools they had back then,
although they must have existed. Anybody know?

I used to lay out my own boards, decals and black crepe tape on
pin-aligned mylar. There would be a padmaster (pads only) and a
separate sheet for each trace layer. We sent it out to Lorry Ray in
Mountain View to be photographed. They could also do cool ground plane
tricks, all with wet photography. We'd send the film out to the fab
house and expect to get it back.

I still have a few layouts around, to show the kids. It was labor
intensive.


(Around here, a lot of the people that you interview have worked for
Dolby. Turnover seems pretty high. They are like ILM, expecting people
to work for glory.)

Has Dolby done anything new or interesting in the past decade?

Big sound systems for movie theatres (a dying biz) and a new home 3D
sound system.


At the abusive prices it is no wonder that movie theaters are going
out of biz.

We go to the movie theater about once or twice a month. Movie
theaters aren't exactly going out of business here. In fact, new ones
are opening relatively often. As far as "abusive prices" go, I don't
consider $7 for a few hours of entertainment to be too bad.

On Sat, 20 Sep 2014 07:22:39 +1000, "David Eather"
wrote:


I still draw a lot, mechanical sketches and schematics. It's much more
intuitive to me than using a screen. I have minions who CAD my stuff
for me.



I agree absolutely about hand drawn, its perfect free form and so user
friendly. But no minions I'm afraid :-(

I draw schematics on D-size blue-grid vellum.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...river_Sh_1.JPG

Following the blue lines makes things pretty neat.

A 22x34 piece of vellum must have about 10 million equivalent pixels.
And I don't have to create a library part before I can draw it. I make
notes, calculations, graphs, tables on the drawings for future
reference, stuff that doesn't make it to the CAD schematics. It's hard
to lose a piece of D-size vellum.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...ilterBoard.jpg

Then, there is this style:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...chematic-1.jpg








--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

On 20/09/14 01:52, John Larkin wrote:
Then, there is this style:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...chematic-1.jpg

Which I've always thought is arrogant in the sense it screams
"my time is worth more than the reader's time". Probably true
in my case, but I'd prefer not to be reminded about it.

I'm undecided whether that style is better or worse than
drawings which have inputs on the right and outputs on the
left

On Fri, 19 Sep 2014 11:14:09 +0100, Tom Gardner
wrote:

I can't seem to sleep. Good time for a rant.

Back in the 70s people used blue and red tape taped out on the
same side of the same piece of plastic sheet, typically at 2:1
scale. The blue was the top copper, the red was the bottom
copper (or vv?!). It was projected through coloured filters
onto the light-sensitive etch resist.

At the risk of starting a nostalgia thread, we didn't use the
different colored tape method. Everything was done 2:1 or preferably
4:1. We used mylar sheets and an Xacto knife, Brady tape "donuts" for
pads, Brady black tape for traces, red rubylith for ground planes and
solder masks. Red photo opaque paint for touchup. I was marked for
an early death when I used one of draftings sacred Xacto knives to cut
traces on a PCB board. They had to be very sharp to work well for
working with rubylith.

I still have my seriously expensive E size 0.1" mylar alignment grid
somewhere. However, the glue on the tape and pads would dry out after
a few years. Most of my early layouts and layout supplies have long
ago dried out and were thrown out. The lifetime of these original
layouts sometimes defined the lifetime of the product as making
changes to a layout using a photographed enlargement or the negatives
or a PCB was not easy.

While computer layout to Gerber plots were common, I found myself
making changes and corrections to old PCB layouts using these methods
well into the 1990's. Old tech dies hard:
"How It Was: PCB Layout from Rubylith to Dot and Tape to CAD"
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=14&doc_id=1285442

In RF, it was common for the design engineers to participate directly
in the layout process. Most managers didn't want to waste expensive
engineering time on "menial" tasks, such as PCB layout and checking.
However, those with an interest in getting things right the first time
had other ideas and allowed direct involvement. For RF boards I would
locate the major RF components on a PCB, mark the location of
grounding holes, and make sure the RF path was reasonably straight,
didn't loop back on itself, devices were properly bypassed, and often
supplied the prototype PCB to the layout person. Just handing them
the schematic and parts list was an invitation to start over from
scratch. In honor of my involvement in this system, the drafting
department presented me with a "Change Everything" rubber stamp.

Four layer boards? No.

Yes, although getting them right was difficult. Without computerized
rule checking, it was easy to create problems and not find them until
the prototype was built.

Poured copper areas? Tedious.

Not really, at least for RF. The real PCB would be fair accurate
clone of the hand made prototype board. The ground plane was always
on top of the PCB. Where the prototype used routed clearances for
non-grounded areas, the PCB layout used rubylith with those areas cut
out with a swivel knife compass. It was a bit tedious, but not very
difficult. The hard part was reconnecting the "islands" of ground
with Brady black tape.

I tried to find examples of such layouts using Google image search and
found nothing. I'll see if I dig out some old photos.

Lifting a blue track layed under a red track? expletive deleted

Yep. That's why we didn't use that method. Instead, we had multiple
layers of transparent mylar, with the layers aligned by punched holes
with "pins" and targets. With a 2 layer PCB, there would be 2 sheets
for the traces, and one each for the solder mask and silk screen. For
digital PCB's, we would use 3 layers. There would be a "pad master",
which was used for both the component and circuit side pads. The
other two sheets were just the traces for the component and circuit
sides. When photographed and reduced, the pad master was combined
with the traces to form the final image. The component outlines (silk
screen) were done by hand with an elevated template and india ink.
Every time components were moved due to a design change, the silk
screen had to be redone from scratch as making changes to the original
were difficult.

With luck everything would fit. With my luck, there could be
duplicate reference designators, test points under parts, traces
shorting to component cases, interchanged circuit and components side
copper, and a myriad of other layout mistakes that never seemed to
completely disappear. I never could get anything right the first.
There would always be mistakes. Even when everything seemed perfect,
somone might do something stupid, like leave the original "tape ups"
in a hot car, and have the pads and traces drift when the glue melts.
Traces and pads falling off on the way to the photographers was
common.

I once worked on a very simple design where I decided I was going to
have one PCB that worked the first time. Everything was triple
checked by 3 different people. Everything looked good until the PCB
arrived. The PCB fab shop had gotten the component and circuit side
reversed. Life was hell.

All of that changed when computerized layout and schematic capture
arrived. The term "capture" is rather interesting as I participated
in several ordeal processes of converting pencil drawings on velum to
vector line drawings on a computer. I think my first was in 1979(?)
on an Applicon CAD system running on a PDP11/34. Having an RF design
engineer doing board layout, mechanical design, and drawing schematics
was initially deemed a waste of time, so I had to do it after hours. I
wanted to experience the entire process, which proved worthwhile.

When I first jumped into this newsgroup in about 2011, I got an
initial surprise when the other JL (John Larkin) announced that he
doesn't do full breadboards of complete products. In the 1970's and
80's, I always did breadboards because there were so many unknowns
that could only be answered by building a prototype. Today, those
problems are anticipated by simulations and better characterized
parts. In other words, most of what I did back then is now totally
obsolete.



--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

"Don Kuenz" wrote in message
...
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=...ess+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

Here's the undisputed king of prototyping;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Wil...nalog_designer)

He published vast amounts of application notes with plenty of photographic
evidence.

On Sat, 20 Sep 2014 07:41:50 -0700, Jeff Liebermann
wrote:

On Fri, 19 Sep 2014 11:14:09 +0100, Tom Gardner
wrote:

I can't seem to sleep. Good time for a rant.

Back in the 70s people used blue and red tape taped out on the
same side of the same piece of plastic sheet, typically at 2:1
scale. The blue was the top copper, the red was the bottom
copper (or vv?!). It was projected through coloured filters
onto the light-sensitive etch resist.

At the risk of starting a nostalgia thread, we didn't use the
different colored tape method. Everything was done 2:1 or preferably
4:1. We used mylar sheets and an Xacto knife, Brady tape "donuts" for
pads, Brady black tape for traces, red rubylith for ground planes and
solder masks. Red photo opaque paint for touchup. I was marked for
an early death when I used one of draftings sacred Xacto knives to cut
traces on a PCB board. They had to be very sharp to work well for
working with rubylith.

We did black pads (padmaster) and black traces. The mylar sheets were
padmaster, top traces, bottom traces, assembly, and often a ground
plane thermals. Sometimes more layers. The photographer could make
ground plane film from the padmaster - all copper, clearances for the
pads, thermals added from the thermal sheet.

We did biggish boards, so worked 2x.

At Data General, only one person had a reserved parking spot: the
layout guy.

The best layout people I have worked with were women. True today.


I still have my seriously expensive E size 0.1" mylar alignment grid
somewhere. However, the glue on the tape and pads would dry out after
a few years. Most of my early layouts and layout supplies have long
ago dried out and were thrown out. The lifetime of these original
layouts sometimes defined the lifetime of the product as making
changes to a layout using a photographed enlargement or the negatives
or a PCB was not easy.

While computer layout to Gerber plots were common, I found myself
making changes and corrections to old PCB layouts using these methods
well into the 1990's. Old tech dies hard:
"How It Was: PCB Layout from Rubylith to Dot and Tape to CAD"
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=14&doc_id=1285442

A good light table, and a young body, were necessary for hand-taped
layout.

You also needed a flat table with an overhead UV light, for burning
sepia assembly and fab drawings from the various mylar layers. And a
blueline machine of course.



In RF, it was common for the design engineers to participate directly
in the layout process. Most managers didn't want to waste expensive
engineering time on "menial" tasks, such as PCB layout and checking.
However, those with an interest in getting things right the first time
had other ideas and allowed direct involvement. For RF boards I would
locate the major RF components on a PCB, mark the location of
grounding holes, and make sure the RF path was reasonably straight,
didn't loop back on itself, devices were properly bypassed, and often
supplied the prototype PCB to the layout person. Just handing them
the schematic and parts list was an invitation to start over from
scratch. In honor of my involvement in this system, the drafting
department presented me with a "Change Everything" rubber stamp.

Four layer boards? No.

Yes, although getting them right was difficult. Without computerized
rule checking, it was easy to create problems and not find them until
the prototype was built.

We didn't have trouble with multilayers. We just checked the layouts
(and the film!) a lot. Most boards worked first time; still do. A
couple days of overboard checking pay off.



Poured copper areas? Tedious.

Not really, at least for RF. The real PCB would be fair accurate
clone of the hand made prototype board. The ground plane was always
on top of the PCB. Where the prototype used routed clearances for
non-grounded areas, the PCB layout used rubylith with those areas cut
out with a swivel knife compass. It was a bit tedious, but not very
difficult. The hard part was reconnecting the "islands" of ground
with Brady black tape.

I tried to find examples of such layouts using Google image search and
found nothing. I'll see if I dig out some old photos.

I still have a few mylar layouts around. I'll post pics if anyone is
interested.



Lifting a blue track layed under a red track? expletive deleted

Yep. That's why we didn't use that method. Instead, we had multiple
layers of transparent mylar, with the layers aligned by punched holes
with "pins" and targets. With a 2 layer PCB, there would be 2 sheets
for the traces, and one each for the solder mask and silk screen. For
digital PCB's, we would use 3 layers. There would be a "pad master",
which was used for both the component and circuit side pads. The
other two sheets were just the traces for the component and circuit
sides. When photographed and reduced, the pad master was combined
with the traces to form the final image. The component outlines (silk
screen) were done by hand with an elevated template and india ink.
Every time components were moved due to a design change, the silk
screen had to be redone from scratch as making changes to the original
were difficult.

With luck everything would fit. With my luck, there could be
duplicate reference designators, test points under parts, traces
shorting to component cases, interchanged circuit and components side
copper, and a myriad of other layout mistakes that never seemed to
completely disappear. I never could get anything right the first.
There would always be mistakes. Even when everything seemed perfect,
somone might do something stupid, like leave the original "tape ups"
in a hot car, and have the pads and traces drift when the glue melts.
Traces and pads falling off on the way to the photographers was
common.

I once worked on a very simple design where I decided I was going to
have one PCB that worked the first time. Everything was triple
checked by 3 different people. Everything looked good until the PCB
arrived. The PCB fab shop had gotten the component and circuit side
reversed. Life was hell.

All of that changed when computerized layout and schematic capture
arrived. The term "capture" is rather interesting as I participated
in several ordeal processes of converting pencil drawings on velum to
vector line drawings on a computer. I think my first was in 1979(?)
on an Applicon CAD system running on a PDP11/34. Having an RF design
engineer doing board layout, mechanical design, and drawing schematics
was initially deemed a waste of time, so I had to do it after hours. I
wanted to experience the entire process, which proved worthwhile.

When I first jumped into this newsgroup in about 2011, I got an
initial surprise when the other JL (John Larkin) announced that he
doesn't do full breadboards of complete products.

I never have!


In the 1970's and
80's, I always did breadboards because there were so many unknowns
that could only be answered by building a prototype. Today, those
problems are anticipated by simulations and better characterized
parts. In other words, most of what I did back then is now totally
obsolete.

--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

On Sat, 20 Sep 2014 17:19:53 +0100, "Ian Field"
wrote:



"Don Kuenz" wrote in message
...
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=...ess+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

Here's the undisputed king of prototyping;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Wil...nalog_designer)

He published vast amounts of application notes with plenty of photographic
evidence.

Jim, rest his dear soul, was something of a hack. Much of his stuff
was over-the-top complex, and his idea of stabilizing any control loop
was to add a huge cap somewhere.

I met him a couple of times at the Foothill flea market. He was nice
and seemed sort of shy. Unlike Bob Pease, who was really out there.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

On 9/15/2014 2:03 PM, Don Kuenz wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=...ess+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

TIA.

--
Don Kuenz

Sometimes. Depends on the situation.

On 9/20/2014 2:04 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 20 Sep 2014 17:19:53 +0100, "Ian Field"
wrote:



"Don Kuenz" wrote in message
...
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=...ess+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

Here's the undisputed king of prototyping;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Wil...nalog_designer)

He published vast amounts of application notes with plenty of photographic
evidence.

Jim, rest his dear soul, was something of a hack. Much of his stuff
was over-the-top complex, and his idea of stabilizing any control loop
was to add a huge cap somewhere.

I met him a couple of times at the Foothill flea market. He was nice
and seemed sort of shy. Unlike Bob Pease, who was really out there.


For a guy with very little formal training and almost no math at all, he
did a remarkable amount. Errol Dietz, who used to be CTO of National,
started out as Bob Pease's technician.

Gotta hand it to folks like that.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

"Phil Hobbs" wrote in message
...
On 9/20/2014 2:04 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 20 Sep 2014 17:19:53 +0100, "Ian Field"
wrote:



"Don Kuenz" wrote in message
...
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=...ess+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

Here's the undisputed king of prototyping;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Wil...nalog_designer)

He published vast amounts of application notes with plenty of
photographic
evidence.

Jim, rest his dear soul, was something of a hack. Much of his stuff
was over-the-top complex, and his idea of stabilizing any control loop
was to add a huge cap somewhere.

I met him a couple of times at the Foothill flea market. He was nice
and seemed sort of shy. Unlike Bob Pease, who was really out there.


For a guy with very little formal training and almost no math at all, he
did a remarkable amount. Errol Dietz, who used to be CTO of National,
started out as Bob Pease's technician.

Gotta hand it to folks like that.

Some of the best appnotes came out of LT (and NS) - unfortunately the bulk
of my junkbox is salage. AFAICR I've yet to find any LT parts in anything.

NS is pretty much a second source supplier too, I almost never find any
parts that are uniquely theirs in anything.

The last NS only part I found was a Boomer stereo amp chip, it was a sort of
large wallet thing with CD pockets, the amp and speakers were bonded into
the foam padding - you had to provide your own CD - "Walkman" device.

On Sat, 20 Sep 2014 11:00:09 -0700, John Larkin
wrote:

The best layout people I have worked with were women. True today.

Agreed.

"How It Was: PCB Layout from Rubylith to Dot and Tape to CAD"
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=14&doc_id=1285442

A good light table, and a young body, were necessary for hand-taped
layout.

Yep. I brought in a NuArc light table that I inherited from a
previous print shop adventure. The lighting was superb, fairly cool,
and the table big enough for most PCB's. Something like this:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/321208321135
I dragged it through 2 employers, several long term consulting jobs,
and two home business ventures.

At the time, leaning over the table for hours was not particularly
difficult. Today, it would give me back pains in about 15 minutes.
Yep, a young body was a requirement. As I vaguely recall, the oldest
PCB layout person I knew that did layout on mylar was about 25 years
old.

You also needed a flat table with an overhead UV light, for burning
sepia assembly and fab drawings from the various mylar layers. And a
blueline machine of course.

Yep. I learned the hard way NOT to run the layout and blueprint paper
through the rollers on the Diazit(?) machine. Destroying the mylar
original was not a good thing. I had a sheet of plywood and a loose
glass plate. I would pile everything between the plywood and glass
plate, and take it outside for the exposure. Most of the time, the
registration was tolerable. At one company, we did have a UV light,
but it was constantly being "borrowed" by the CEO's son for his
psychedelic light show parties.

We didn't have trouble with multilayers. We just checked the layouts
(and the film!) a lot. Most boards worked first time; still do. A
couple days of overboard checking pay off.

That was suggested many times. However, the schedule never permitted
it. Management tended to prefer doing things over rather than getting
it right the first time. I was not in a position to change that even
though the damage it caused was obvious to everyone involved.

I still have a few mylar layouts around. I'll post pics if anyone is
interested.

I found one of my layouts from 1985:
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/PCB-Layout/
It's a light pen interface card for the IBM PD as a 16 bit ISA card. I
did a lousy job and am not very proud of it. However, it does show
what was typical of 1970's PCB layout technology. If anyone wants
details or more drawings, please say something as all of this is going
into the trash in a few daze.

When I first jumped into this newsgroup in about 2011, I got an
initial surprise when the other JL (John Larkin) announced that he
doesn't do full breadboards of complete products.

I never have!

Never having announced or never having done full breadboards? I'll
assume never having done full breadboards.

You gave me quite a shock when you mentioned that. I've always built
breadboards of everything I've done. At first, I didn't think it was
possible to bypass the breadboard stage. I then talked to others in
the business and found that few have the time or justification to do
full breadboards. Many things have changed between the 1970's and
today. Mostly, the components have become so small, that building a
breadboard (much less the real product) by hand would be impossible. I
tried it with a PCB that had a few 0603 resistors and decided that it
wasn't going to happen. Better to go directly to the PCB. Also, as I
mentioned, modeling, simulations, and better characterization of the
components have also improved the situation.

Back to refurbishing a sewing machine. One can't do electronics full
time.

--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

On Sat, 20 Sep 2014 17:22:29 -0700, Jeff Liebermann
wrote:

On Sat, 20 Sep 2014 11:00:09 -0700, John Larkin
wrote:

The best layout people I have worked with were women. True today.

Agreed.

"How It Was: PCB Layout from Rubylith to Dot and Tape to CAD"
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=14&doc_id=1285442

A good light table, and a young body, were necessary for hand-taped
layout.

Yep. I brought in a NuArc light table that I inherited from a
previous print shop adventure. The lighting was superb, fairly cool,
and the table big enough for most PCB's. Something like this:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/321208321135
I dragged it through 2 employers, several long term consulting jobs,
and two home business ventures.

At the time, leaning over the table for hours was not particularly
difficult. Today, it would give me back pains in about 15 minutes.
Yep, a young body was a requirement. As I vaguely recall, the oldest
PCB layout person I knew that did layout on mylar was about 25 years
old.

You also needed a flat table with an overhead UV light, for burning
sepia assembly and fab drawings from the various mylar layers. And a
blueline machine of course.

Yep. I learned the hard way NOT to run the layout and blueprint paper
through the rollers on the Diazit(?) machine. Destroying the mylar
original was not a good thing. I had a sheet of plywood and a loose
glass plate. I would pile everything between the plywood and glass
plate, and take it outside for the exposure. Most of the time, the
registration was tolerable. At one company, we did have a UV light,
but it was constantly being "borrowed" by the CEO's son for his
psychedelic light show parties.

You didn't literally need a UV light. A 250-watt warehouse-type
mercury vapor lamp, maybe 6 feet above a table, worked fine.






We didn't have trouble with multilayers. We just checked the layouts
(and the film!) a lot. Most boards worked first time; still do. A
couple days of overboard checking pay off.

That was suggested many times. However, the schedule never permitted
it. Management tended to prefer doing things over rather than getting
it right the first time. I was not in a position to change that even
though the damage it caused was obvious to everyone involved.

I still have a few mylar layouts around. I'll post pics if anyone is
interested.

I found one of my layouts from 1985:
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/PCB-Layout/
It's a light pen interface card for the IBM PD as a 16 bit ISA card. I
did a lousy job and am not very proud of it. However, it does show
what was typical of 1970's PCB layout technology. If anyone wants
details or more drawings, please say something as all of this is going
into the trash in a few daze.

Ooh, curved traces. I was taught to never do that, on the theory that
the tape would eventually creep in the corners.





When I first jumped into this newsgroup in about 2011, I got an
initial surprise when the other JL (John Larkin) announced that he
doesn't do full breadboards of complete products.

I never have!

Never having announced or never having done full breadboards? I'll
assume never having done full breadboards.

Right. I only breadboard little snippets of circuits. For most
designs, I don't breadboard anything. What with ARM CPUs and FPGAs and
all those tiny parts, breadboarding doesn't work.

It's faster and better to lay out a board, check the heck out of it,
have manufacturing build a couple, and test it.

I know companies that define "breadboard" "prototype" "beta"
"pre-production" "pilot production" and "production". And use all of
them. Takes them years to finish anything. They assume the first few
iterations will have errors, so they do.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

On Sat, 20 Sep 2014 18:25:05 -0700, John Larkin
wrote:

You didn't literally need a UV light. A 250-watt warehouse-type
mercury vapor lamp, maybe 6 feet above a table, worked fine.

Yep. That should work. Some detail and alternatives:
http://unblinkingeye.com/Articles/Light/light.html
How we got to the plywood and glass kludge was almost predictable.
Someone defined the need. Management declared that there was no
money, floor space, staffing, etc. Irritated engineer throws
something temporary together to be used only until the necessary
money, floor space, staffing, etc are found. However, since the
temporary kludge worked reasonably well, the crisis had been averted,
and the kludge become permanent.

Moral: If it works, it's permanent.

I found one of my layouts from 1985:
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/PCB-Layout/
It's a light pen interface card for the IBM PD as a 16 bit ISA card. I
did a lousy job and am not very proud of it. However, it does show
what was typical of 1970's PCB layout technology. If anyone wants
details or more drawings, please say something as all of this is going
into the trash in a few daze.

Ooh, curved traces. I was taught to never do that, on the theory that
the tape would eventually creep in the corners.

That does happen if one stretches the tape when laying a trace. It's
especially bad with narrow traces. Traces will move, especially if
the layout is left in the sun. I used a rubber roller from my wet
photography kit, to flatten the traces and make sure they're properly
stuck to the mylar. (Incidentally, note that I used acetate instead
of mylar in the above layout. Not a good idea and I forgot why I did
it).

For RF, rounded corners are a problem due to impedance bumps. Sharp
corners are equally bad due to reflection problems. The compromise is
a chamfered corner (mitered bend):
http://www.microwaves101.com/microwave-encyclopedia/480-mitered-bends
which unfortunately also makes a tolerable fuse at the bend.

However, the above PCB is not an RF board. Instead, the problem was
the cheap wave solder machine that we were using at the time. Somehow,
it often managed to burn or scrape off the solder mask on sharp corner
bends. The result was usually an impressive solder bridge at the
corners and a tedious touchup job. I was never able to determine the
cause, so it was circumvented by using radiused bends and liberal
trace spacing.

I know companies that define "breadboard" "prototype" "beta"
"pre-production" "pilot production" and "production". And use all of
them. Takes them years to finish anything.

I had a weird situation at 3 consecutive companies. After the usual
extremely long management inspired delays deciding if the company
should work on a given product, a schedule was created, usually by the
engineering manager. Invariably, there was not enough time to work
through a proper design. For example, one project that took about 8
or 9 months from conception to delivery, only allowed 2 weeks for the
initial (paper) design. Everything else was allowed a fairly normal
period (breadboard, testing, FCC certification, compliance testing,
fixture construction, prototype run in manufacturing, etc). In
effect, the design was mostly frozen two weeks after the project
started. Little wonder we needed a full prototype in order to find
the inevitable design errors. If we had time to have done a more
rigorous design, much of the subsequent fire drills could have been
avoided.

They assume the first few
iterations will have errors, so they do.

As I previously noted, my attempts to do one product perfectly the
first time, failed because the PC fab house reversed the component and
circuit sides of the PCB.

Lesson learned: Trust but verify.

--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

On Sat, 20 Sep 2014 20:01:26 -0700, Jeff Liebermann
wrote:

On Sat, 20 Sep 2014 18:25:05 -0700, John Larkin
wrote:

You didn't literally need a UV light. A 250-watt warehouse-type
mercury vapor lamp, maybe 6 feet above a table, worked fine.

Yep. That should work. Some detail and alternatives:
http://unblinkingeye.com/Articles/Light/light.html
How we got to the plywood and glass kludge was almost predictable.
Someone defined the need. Management declared that there was no
money, floor space, staffing, etc. Irritated engineer throws
something temporary together to be used only until the necessary
money, floor space, staffing, etc are found. However, since the
temporary kludge worked reasonably well, the crisis had been averted,
and the kludge become permanent.

Moral: If it works, it's permanent.

I found one of my layouts from 1985:
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/PCB-Layout/
It's a light pen interface card for the IBM PD as a 16 bit ISA card. I
did a lousy job and am not very proud of it. However, it does show
what was typical of 1970's PCB layout technology. If anyone wants
details or more drawings, please say something as all of this is going
into the trash in a few daze.

Ooh, curved traces. I was taught to never do that, on the theory that
the tape would eventually creep in the corners.

That does happen if one stretches the tape when laying a trace. It's
especially bad with narrow traces. Traces will move, especially if
the layout is left in the sun. I used a rubber roller from my wet
photography kit, to flatten the traces and make sure they're properly
stuck to the mylar. (Incidentally, note that I used acetate instead
of mylar in the above layout. Not a good idea and I forgot why I did
it).

For RF, rounded corners are a problem due to impedance bumps. Sharp
corners are equally bad due to reflection problems. The compromise is
a chamfered corner (mitered bend):
http://www.microwaves101.com/microwave-encyclopedia/480-mitered-bends
which unfortunately also makes a tolerable fuse at the bend.

I sometimes put test traces with SMAs on boards and TDR them. For a 50
ohm microstrip on a normal board, 90 degree bends are invisible on a
20 GHz TDR. Vias are visible. What's tough is the transition from
microstrip to an edge-launch SMA. We've spent a lot of time getting
that good, ATLC sims and such.




However, the above PCB is not an RF board. Instead, the problem was
the cheap wave solder machine that we were using at the time. Somehow,
it often managed to burn or scrape off the solder mask on sharp corner
bends. The result was usually an impressive solder bridge at the
corners and a tedious touchup job. I was never able to determine the
cause, so it was circumvented by using radiused bends and liberal
trace spacing.

I know companies that define "breadboard" "prototype" "beta"
"pre-production" "pilot production" and "production". And use all of
them. Takes them years to finish anything.

I had a weird situation at 3 consecutive companies. After the usual
extremely long management inspired delays deciding if the company
should work on a given product, a schedule was created, usually by the
engineering manager. Invariably, there was not enough time to work
through a proper design. For example, one project that took about 8
or 9 months from conception to delivery, only allowed 2 weeks for the
initial (paper) design. Everything else was allowed a fairly normal
period (breadboard, testing, FCC certification, compliance testing,
fixture construction, prototype run in manufacturing, etc). In
effect, the design was mostly frozen two weeks after the project
started. Little wonder we needed a full prototype in order to find
the inevitable design errors. If we had time to have done a more
rigorous design, much of the subsequent fire drills could have been
avoided.

They assume the first few
iterations will have errors, so they do.

As I previously noted, my attempts to do one product perfectly the
first time, failed because the PC fab house reversed the component and
circuit sides of the PCB.

We used to put PARTS SIDE and SOLDER SIDE in copper text. They need to
read right on the finished board.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com