Thursday, June 14, 2012

Building an Arduino LCD Interface, Part III

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