Making a PCB for your hardware project (when you know nothing about it)

If you’re making or prototyping a hardware product, the chances are that you will need to make your own PCB board. A PC what? Yes, that’s the same thing I would have said several months ago if we would have talked about it directly. But here is the reality, you will need a PCB board for your product if you want to save space and assembly time. Yet, someone else will make it for you, but knowing a bit more about the subject will help you to have a clearer vision.

During the making of Lesk, we came across the need to make a custom PCB board for our product. We could have continued without, but for several reasons, we decided to make our own. We weren’t disappointed and I’ll try to explain everything in this small article here.

But first, let me explain briefly what is a PCB.

What is a PCB?

A PCB (stands for Printed circuit board) is this green board we all have inside all our electronic components. It helps to keep everything tidy inside our products. Due to a special technology, it avoids having too many cables. The circuits are arranged in thin layers. It helps the current, hence the information, to pass without the need of hundreds of thousands of cables. It also packs all your components, hence saving a huge amount of space.

In our case, we used to use prototyping PCB for Lesk. The problem was the time of assembly and the final result.

First, it took us more than 30 minutes to assemble all our components and solder them. Second, there were cables everywhere that weren’t really homogenous. Which means that it was a complete mess for the time we spent on it. Lastly, getting the prototype board and the cables were almost twice expensive as getting the PCB.

So we had no choice but to make and get our own.

Can you do your own PCB if you know nothing?

At first, we were pretty scared about how we could achieve it. None of us was an electrical engineer and we thought that we would need to pay someone to get it done. But we were wrong.

For sure, making a PCB board for complicated products such as a laptop or a phone would require a lot of engineers. PCB making is for sure a real science, don’t get me wrong. But it’s mostly not the case when you’re prototyping and want to show that your concept works.

So the answer to that is simply “yes” with a bit of work to understand what you’ll do.

You need to have your own circuit to make your PCB

As we already had our own circuit on a breadboard, we were able to choose every component we needed. Of course, engineers making PCB might use the real components directly to gain efficiency and space on the board. The question to ask is: is it really your goal?

That wasn’t ours. We wanted to have a system that would save us enough time without requiring high expertise on it.

In that case, then, PCB making was really accessible as we were already buying our components on some famous websites. We then just needed some to gain space and time on the assembly.

But how and where did we start?

How to start making your own PCB? 

To start with PCB making, as usual, I watched a series of tutorials on how to make a PCB board on Youtube. Here is the link for those who are interested. The advantage of this tutorial was that I got both feet into the world of PCB making. From 0 to something. Not a lot, not enough to make complicated circuits, but something.

At the end of this tutorial then. I acquired enough knowledge to eventually make my own simple PCB. But not the confidence to really do that. I figured out I needed to get it done by someone else in order to be sure of the result.

To do so, I decided to take a look at Fiverr. The good thing with Fiverr is that it has cheap services. The bad thing is that professional expectations don’t always meet. For instance, logo design. There are a lot of people ready to draw you a logo on Fiverr, but few can really provide a professional result. It’s ok if you’re starting, but can be limiting if you have expectations.

I was then afraid of this on Fiverr, but knowing I followed the beginning of a course on this, I had some confidence on how to recognize a good enough PCB design from a bad one. Mostly, I knew I could speak to the PCB maker to be sure of the work (and I was right to do so as I provided the wrong model of the microcontroller we’re using).

I paid Shourav around 60€ to have my design done. I don’t know if it was a lot or not, but for my first one, I still think I got it secured. I knew it would help me a lot in the process of making the product so I thought that 60€ was a good price. 

As I said, due to the tutorial I followed, I knew what I was talking about. Not as an expert, but mostly as someone who needs to have a global understanding of the project. I knew by looking at the schematics that I provided another reference for the microcontroller. This kind of mistake can cost a lot when you don’t know anything about the subject.

The freelancer made me good work in less than one week. I didn’t have any particular deadline, but it felt great to have your file sooner than expected. 

Once the file came, I used the service JLCPCB. The advantage of this service is that everything is simple. One only needs to upload a special file that was delivered and that’s it. This is also really cheap. Only one bad side, the delivery costs that can be pretty high if you’re in a hurry. It wasn’t our case. They delivered us in around 15 days. 

After that, it was time to try it and…

Conclusion: Is it worth making your own PCB?

To be clear, what we want to do with Lesk, is to be able to produce them in small series. Kind of artisanally.

Our goal with having our own PCB was to 1) save some time 2) save some space.

When our PCBs arrived, everything worked well. All our components were packed on a simple small board or the size of a visit card. We had holes to let us build a 3D printed box to hold it. It took us less than 5 minutes to solder (against 30 minutes before) and it fits perfectly with the product.

So our answer to that is “yes”. But the condition is that your electronics should be simple. If you start complicating everything, it might be very expensive, mostly if you don’t really understand your product.