How to Prepare and Send Eagle PCB Board for Fabrication

Hi!

In this short tutorial i will show you how to export your pcb and send it off to a PCB fabrication house to get it manufactured for you.

In this tutorial I will use ALLPCB fab. house.

www.allpcb.com

Let's get started.

Saving your's work is always important.Just in case you make something wrong,it is always reccomended to have backup of your work.

We need to input our PCB tolerances in DRC box of Eagle,and make sure there are no drc errors,

We do that by clicking on DRC check button in Eagle software.Always make sure that you are using values declared by your PCB making company.

After making sure there are no DRC errors we can move on.

Now comes the fun part.We create our gerber files that we need to send off for manufacture.

We do that by cliking on CAM procesor icon in Files section.

From there we chose job gerb274x. It includes all file extension needed to create pcb board excluding the .drd file used for drilling holes.

We just need to run the excelon job seperatly to create file for holes

If we need to we can add layers to our gerber files if we need to proces them.

Now we need to locate all gerber files that we just have created.

By default they are located where project itself is.Navigate to there and zip all the gerber files into one zip folder.

Now we need to find our PCB making company.

Here i will use ALLPCB website because i already have ordered multiple PCBs from them and they have always turned out beautifully,and now they even offer a free shiping!

We need to register to website.I wont show you how to do that :)

Usualy you have to find Quick Quote or something like that and fill in the form.In there you enter your PCB size,number of PCBs,colour you want,spacing and all the details you need.You can even left a note with your order.

And then you click add to cart.

You will then need to upload .zip file you recently created,pay and thats it.We are all done and you can expect your boards any time soon.

I have chosen ALLPCB because :

The board build time is very fast,only 2 days are needed to produce full pcb board.

The shipping is also very fast.I chosed free shipping,but i stil got fully functional shipping number,fully traceable on track17.Boards came to me 2 weeks after uploading my gerber files,which is awesome.Even my local PCB making companies aren't that fast.

The boards came in in a really nice package,wrapped tightly in vacuum plastic.After fully inspecting the boards i found no breaks,scratches or everything of that sort.

While inspecting my board I have found out that silkscreen is very precise and up to point of perfections.All letters are correctly spelled and look really nice.Soldermask is also very consistent,with no imperfections what so ever.

Drilling of mounting holes and holes for DIP chip placing is done remarkably,with no errors what so ever.

Also the edges are nice and smooth,not sharp like other PCB fab hauses are doing it.

The board are really easy to solder,even the silkscreen is white,it does not get that much dirty at all(unfortunatly I am not able to upload all photos).

After soldering the boards functioned normaly as expected,indicating that all traces and power planes are correctly done with no errors.

I would rate this pcb 10/10.Everything is ordered beautifully and up to all standards.

I would now for sure use ALLPCB for all my projects that require custom PCB board.

Tweet me @ivica3730k to get more info and all pictures :)