lost lost beyond lost

[bobodechimp]

ok I can solder. i know the the symbols on a schismatic are, mostly. but i am lost in trying to figure out how to lay on out for example the  aron nelson's fender bass boy i kid of know whats going on with it but hell if i know how to lay one out. is there a program that can do this for you or a Tutorial or do you have to become an electro wizard and experience enlightenment prior to being able to see the forest through the tress?

[NPrescott]

It isn't the easiest thing, but it's a skill like any other. It'll take some practice for you to get the hang of it, which means you'll likely make mistakes. I can't find a Fender Bass Boy, so I can't speak to that particular circuit, but it's usually a good idea to stick with other people's layouts until you've done several easy ones successfully.

I'd check out the projects and how-to pages at SmallBear as Steve is an excellent teacher.
http://www.smallbearelec.com/home.html

Run Off Groove is also a great place with the very simple projects to start with like the Ruby. If you'd compare the schematic with the perf layouts they provide you'd start to get an idea of how it works.
http://www.runoffgroove.com

There's always room for improvement and entire books on layout theory (usually to reduce noise/transients/etc).

[R.G.]

Learning to do layout is like learning to play guitar. You can read all you want, but you never really learn until you pick it up and start hacking.

Programs exist to do layout, but they are somewhere between mediocre and useless on analog circuits.

[Kearns892]

+1 on what R.G. said. Find simple schematics and try making layouts for them and work your way up.

However I don't think R.G. means there is nothing to be gained by reading (I hope not or else I wasted my money buying his book  ) only that you should use any reading as a supplement to hands on experience.

(BTW I would highly recommend R.G.'s book! thanks for taking the time to put that together R.G.!)

[R.G.]

You're right Jordan. Reading never hurts, and NOT reading can hurt badly.

But skill accumulates from actually doing. Reading can reduce the amount of wasted materials and accumulated scars.

[smallbearelec]

This is a response both to the general question about doing board layouts from a schematic and the question from the person who was thinking about drawing a pattern directly on copper. It's a summary of things I have thought about at various times, and I'm going to preserve it as an FAQ to help with answering e-mail.

As to drawing on copper: It Is actually possible to do this for Very simple designs, using either a Sharpie Permanent or a purpose-designed industrial marker.  That said, realistically you are going to want to plan what you draw either on paper or on screen. So in both cases, we are talking about doing a layout--going from a schematic that relates components in a logical flow to a physical placement of parts on a substrate with interconnections.

It's possible to do this with just pencil and paper, and I used to back in the days before PCs existed.  It was a miserable process then, and it still is.  Don't let the seeming simplicity of drawing on paper deter you from spending the time to learn to use a software tool of some kind. Essentially, you need a way to be able to display outlines of various components and draw lines between pads that represent wires or traces on the board.  I have used or know of several possible software solutions, will discuss them a little bit and, I hope, give you some direction.

I used to use MS Paint or Paint Shop for doing perfboard layouts, and even for designing PC boards that I made myself. These programs have a lot of limitations for board design, but they can still be useful for DIY purposes. If you already know one of them, you can try using the program as you would pencil and paper to begin to sketch out a layout.  But a couple of major caveats:

--General-purpose drawing programs of this kind don't give you the ability to easily correct mistakes; draw a trace incorrectly, and you have to erase it pixel-by-pixel rather than just selecting it and clicking Delete.

--Presuming that you might, at some point, want to turn your idea into a manufactured board, there is no way to go from a pixilated drawing to a file that can be fed to automated machinery.

If you are starting from scratch in terms of learning a software tool and don't intend to get your design manufactured, absolutely do check out DIY Layout Creator at diy-fever.com.  While I don't use the program for reasons I will get to in a bit, my reasons will not apply to most DIYers.  From what I can see, DIY Layout Creator works much like MS Paint would if it had editing functions geared to board design.  The fella who suggested in this thread looking at some of the schematics at runoffgroove is right on: Give some time to learning the basics of DIY Layout Creator (it is free), and then take a crack at using it to go from one of the simpler runoffgroove designs to a proposed board layout.  Then build it, and see how close you get to something gig-worthy.  One basic design rule that I got hammered into me, partly by bitter experience and partly out of reading R. G. Keen's book: Before you place components, define where your off-board connections to the jacks, controls and switches will be. This will dictate a lot about where you place components on the board.

The only caveat I have about DIY Layout Creator is that its output is strictly a graphic file; if you want to get a board fabricated commercially, you have to go a different route.

The tool I now use for doing both perfboard layouts and manufacturable board designs is EAGLE CAD.  It is a really super, industrial-strength program. A design that you generate in EAGLE can be exported as a bitmap or PDF at any desired scale.  Beyond that, the program will generate CAD files in formats that are understood by every printed circuit board fab in the world. A fully-functional demo version can be downloaded from cadsoftusa.com. Now for the caveats about this one:

--The demo version is limited to a certain number of pins. I have the licensed version, and so am able to use it to do relatively large perfboard layouts, but the license fee is fairly high. Well-worth it and affordable for a business, but not necessarily for a hobbyist.

--EAGLE was designed for commercial users by engineers, so it has functions in it to do really wild, complex and difficult stuff.  Part of the fairly steep learning curve to using it involves finding and learning the relatively small number of commands that you actually need to be comfortable with. I do not want to take the time to do a keystroke-and-mouse-click tutorial for it right now, so I am just noting that such an aid would make the program useful to a much wider audience.

You can get a good deal of free support for both DIY Layout Creator and EAGLE from the residents at this Forum who know them. However, don't expect to be able to ask intelligent questions before you have started to climb the ladder at least some. HAPPY CONTRUCTION!

SD

[derevaun]

My first attempts at layouts were point-to-point, which means bending the leads of the components  and soldering them to each other to make the connections. I made a few of the projects in Craig Anderton's Electronic Projects for Musicians that way. I think I used his layouts as a help when I got into a corner, but for the most part I didn't understand them and just moved through the schematic. For example, I'd start with an IC or transistor, and connect up resistor/capacitor leads to their pins, starting with ground and power.

Every project worked, eventually, and it was pretty easy to concentrate on having the ground path close to the power path. For simple things like assembling a sample circuit from a datasheet, I still do that.

For moderately crude projects I use Eagle CAD, which is also pretty easy. There are some good video tutorials by Tangent, and good blog post tutorials by Gaussmarkov. Surely there are a lot of other helpful tutorials on the interwebs. The free version can handle way more pins that my brain can, at this point.

There's also DipTrace, which is a good alternative to Eagle--it's generally more sophisticated and less frustrating than Eagle in some ways. I still use Eagle, just because it's more familiar and in more widespread use among maker/hacker/artgeek circles. I wish more people shared their Eagle files, like they do in other circles.

But IMHO the best option is to use fabricated PCB from places like madbean, musicpcb or tonepad, or the various and random people who offer them up for sale. Etched boards, like from guitarpcb, are good too.