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As part of the LED light development process, I've been designing a custom printed circuit board. I built the first few with protoboards, but it's slow, messy, and unreliable. After some on-line research, I found http://www.4pcb.com/. Apart from offering a reasonably-priced product, they also have a free circuit design package called PCB Artist. It's been over 20 years since I last designed a PCB, and much has changed.
I ran through many iterations of the circuit board, always using the auto-router. The original layout was 2.5 x 4.5 inches. Eventually I got it down to 2 x 4 inches, with the components mounting on both sides of the board. I placed the order on Tuesday, for 4-week delivery.
After placing the order, I played around with the software some more. I manually laid out the power and ground lines, then had the auto-router take care of the rest. The resulting design is a bit more elegant, and has only 1 via instead of 6. However, the submitted design should work just fine. But for the next order, I will know to optimise the process with a bit of manual intervention. Routing algorithms may be efficient, but they have no sense of style.
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