[time-nuts] RS232 / GPS interface/prototyping board

[Clint Jay]

Life is so much easier now,  dirtypcb is a great service,  I have a pile of
boards here from them which are far greater quality than anything I could
hope to produce at home or even in the lab I used to have.  They're also
better quality than any of the local board houses I used in the past.

Having said that,  I did hand manufacture fifty single sided boards from
photo laminate to completed product in one weekend using a Dremel drill
press for somewhere around four thousand holes and hand soldering every
component so it was definitely possible
On 23 Jun 2016 00:01, "Nick Sayer via time-nuts" <time-nuts at febo.com> wrote:

>
> > On Jun 22, 2016, at 1:33 PM, Mark Sims <holrum at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > The value, quality, and turn-around from all these places is amazing.
>  In the olden days, one was paying $50 a square inch for a single prototype
> board with 4 week turn-around.
> >
>
> Not to turn this into the “Four Yorkshireman” sketch, but in the olden
> days (which by my reckoning were maybe only 10 years ago) there wasn’t
> reasonable hobbyist access to PCB CAD software either - like EAGLE or
> Altium or KiCad or the like.
>
> When I was a teenager (mid 80s) I tried making my own PCB with clad board,
> an etch resist pen, that nasty brown acid and the smallest drill bit I
> could get my hands on. This was a single-sided board - I had absolutely no
> way to line up a two-sided design even if through-hole plating would have
> been an option (of course, it wouldn’t have). No solder resist, no silk
> screen.
>
> It was a disaster. Even with a drill press I couldn’t line the DIP holes
> up closely enough to mash a chip in without bending the leads to hell and
> gone.
>
> It was that - and seeing the arrival of surface mount - that convinced me
> at the time that there was no future for hobbyist electronic design and
> creation. I dove with both feet into a career in software engineering.
>
> I had no clue that all I had to do was wait 20 years.
>
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