Continuing with the Building an Arduino LCD Interface series, this post will focus on creating the LCD panel PCB in Eagle.
With the schematic open in Eagle, choose File | Switch to Board to create a new board from the schematic. Drag the components onto the board as desired, then use the Autorouter tool to quickly run the wires (I'm not exactly building a motherboard here, so no need to worry about how pretty the wiring is). I then used the Text Tool to add some labels, placing them on layer 25 (tNames).
To create a ground plane on each side of the board, the polygon tool was used. The following settings must be used: Width=10, Isolation set to ON, and Isolate=12 (see the following snapshot).
With the above settings in place, a polygon is drawn around the outside perimeter of the board. After creating the polygon, use the Name Tool and rename the polygon GND. Repeat this process, but instead of using 1 Top, use 16 Bottom for the layer. Finally, press the Rats Nest Tool to fully render the polygon (until you do this, the polygon will appear as a dotted line, as seen in the image below). This process is fully documented in a video on YouTube by rpcelectronics.
To verify the board, use the Tools | DRC function. Make sure to load the appropriate set of rules - in my case, Sunstone Circuits is the manufacturer, so the appropriate setting for this board was "EAGLE Design Rules for *2* Layer Designs (DS)".
Finally, the Sunstone Circuits PDF instructions titled "EAGLE v5.0+ Board Convert to Gerber Made Easy!" were followed to generate the required files for manufacturing. For this board, I used the "2LPlus-Sunstone.cam" processing file. After running all the gerber-related jobs, below is a the list of files that was zipped up to submit to order the PCB:
The next post will discuss final assembly of the board. This post will most likely not be written until sometime in July (due to manufacturing/shipping times).
No comments:
Post a Comment