Fabbing the Pebble boards

[Jonathan Oxer]

Hey party people,

I've been watching (mostly) silently from the sidelines while Luke has
applied his magic and with the assistance of many other people has
brought the Pebble design up to be a well-polished project. Now it's
time to get some of these suckers fabbed so we can do final checks of
assembly time with a variety of people and put together enough boards in
various states (bare, part-assembled, fully-assembled) for the miniconf.

I've run through Luke's generated Gerber files in gerbv and they look
sensible enough, so I'm going to submit a quote request to PCBcart right
now to get the process underway. That still gives a day or two for final
tweaks before the files are locked in for production, so if there are
any last minute changes to make (overlay changes to s/100K/10K/ for a
couple of parts, perhaps?) please speak up right now.

We also need to decide on a colour to use. Personally I've become quite
partial to the black-overlay-on-yellow-soldermask used for the PA
prototyping shields, but these aren't PA boards and since it's Luke's
baby he gets final say. PCBcart provide a bunch of colour options so if
there are opinions on that please say so, but I'll defer to Luke for the
final decision.

Cheers :-)
--
Jonathan Oxer
Ph +61 4 3851 6600
Practical Arduino <www.practicalarduino.com>
SuperHouse Automation <www.superhouse.tv>
Geek My Ride! <www.geekmyride.org>

[Luke Weston]

Oh, I was wondering when someone would notice those Gerber files were
there.
I've revised them slightly to fix some minor DRC issues and make the
silk screen neater... I'll have to re-push the repository when I get
home.

I get no DRC errors in Eagle when using the Sparkfun example DRC rule
file... except for a bunch of "stop mask" errors - and I don't know
what they are. I don't think they're serious though.

Has Marc had a look at the board layout or Gerber files? Andy keeps
reminding me that his input would be valuable prior to sending it off
to PCBCart... I've never made a layout for professional manufacturing
before.

Colors? I don't know. I liked the black PA shields personally.

Green just looks like your plain typical PCB - something markedly
different would be nice. Red looks too much like another ubiquitous
Sparkfun board :)

Maybe black, blue or purple?

Cheers,
Luke

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[Jonathan Oxer]

There's also the question of material thickness. Common PCB material is
1.6mm but for a small board that can seem very thick. The second batch
of PA ProtoShields was fabbed on 1.2mm material and I prefer it, but we
also have to consider that these may be handled a bit roughly by
beginners so maybe the extra rigidity of 1.6mm is justified.

If I was having these boards fabbed for my personal use I'd go 1.2mm,
but given the audience I'm leaning toward 1.6. For now I'm going to spec
1.6mm but if anyone has strong feelings either way please speak up.

[Jonathan Oxer]

On Sun, 2009-11-22 at 20:53 -0800, Luke Weston wrote:

> Colors? I don't know. I liked the black PA shields personally.
>
> Green just looks like your plain typical PCB - something markedly
> different would be nice. Red looks too much like another ubiquitous
> Sparkfun board :)
>
> Maybe black, blue or purple?

How about we try white? PCBcart list it as an option and I've been
wanting to try it ever since seeing the Seeed Studio boards. Black
overlay on white boards could look cool.

We also need to consider the overlay colour. For a black board we'd need
to pick a light overlay, of course.

Luke, what do you think?

[Jonathan Oxer]

OK, it's in. I've just paid for 100 Pebble PCBs + shipping to Melbourne,
so in the next day or so we'll need to supply the final Gerber files for
them to work from.

[michaelc]

> Colors? I don't know. I liked the black PA shields personally.
>
> Green just looks like your plain typical PCB - something markedly
> different would be nice. Red looks too much like another ubiquitous
> Sparkfun board :)
>
> Maybe black, blue or purple?

Just in case people don't know, colours other green often attract an
extra charge. For pcbcart, it's an extra USD$10 for the batch plus a
little bit extra per board. Thickness other than 1.6mm often costs
more too, but in pcbcart's case it seems that just adds a little per
board. Obviously for a run of 100 boards these costs don't matter, but
if you're ever in the position of ordering just one or two for protos
it's worth knowing how to keep the cost down.

Michael