Making your own PCBs boards is a time consuming task. If I need to make 1 or 2 simple boards I don’t mind spending some time and building a few but if you will ever need more than that you better look at getting them made by a professional PCB manufacturer. This means that drawing a picture of your copper layer in a graphics program and printing it on a transparency won’t exactly cut it since all of the PCB manufacturers will need Gerber and Excellon files. But with these files they can work their magic.
Eric from Base2 gets his PCBs made at Advanced Circuits and they were nice enough to give him a tour of their facility. I have seen all of these steps before except for flying-probe electrical testing, I have had this done on my boards but never knew how it was done. Watch the video below to see it in action. What the test is doing is ensuring every pad is shorted by traces to other pads and is properly isolated from pads which should not be connected.
Thanks for sending in the post Eric!
