Circuit Board Design Files

Hi all!

I notice people often don't post their hardware design files (e.g. circuit board layouts) with their projects. Occasionally they'll link to a GitHub repo with their source code, but that isn't always guaranteed.

Why are people less inclined to share their hardware design files than their source code? I think these resources would be very helpful in getting started on a new project.

Thanks for the guidance,
Jackson

With a lot of Espruino projects I think often people just sketch their designs on paper, or perhaps just connect things up as they go. It means that actually digitising the design is a lot of extra effort that people don't want.

Also, it's surprisingly rare that users here make custom PCBs (or at least share projects with them) - committing to send your design away to be made into a PCB means you need to be much more sure of it than if you just knocked something up on breadboard.

I for one don't share my design files because I sell my boards, and don't want someone else to grab my design and start competing with me.

But seriously, I've seen a lot of cases where people are selling hardware, and open sourcing the software that runs on it. You can't get people to pay shit for software unless you have something in the top 0.1%, or it's a custom job for someone. But getting your custom board manufactured and selling those works fine.

Also, often source code has pieces stolen from other people in it, so you're constrained - you may have to open source it. PCB layouts are almost always done from scratch.

I think there's also an emotional aspect, since layouts are more tightly linked to a physical thing.

Thanks for giving your personal experience @DrAzzy. Why do you think selling custom boards is still a viable option? Is it the board design that is the challenge, or the manufacturing that is the challenge?

I find that as an amateur, it's incredibly valuable to see others' designs so that I can learn from a high quality source, thereby avoiding rookie errors and achieving state of the art designs sooner. Do you feel there is much to be gained from seeing the board design source files over inspecting a physical board, particularly with respect to learning how to design boards?

There are a bunch of factors that favor boards - unlike software, it actually needs to be manufactured. The manufacturing costs go down dramatically with quantity, and the manufacturing process is typically around a 2-week wait with DHL shipping, or 3-5 weeks via ox-cart. So unless you needed quantity, you'd be better off buying from the designer anyway.

Also, there's room for error in the process of generating the gerbers from the design files - I fucked up with my last order, actually - that's why I'm selling RN2483 breakout boards with no top silkscreen at buy-2-get-1-free... X_X Of course, if by design documents you mean the gerbers already generated, that gives a much better shot at successful board manufacture - but you can't edit them or generate a board layout file (like the eagle .brd files) from them, so there's not much of a learning opportunity there.

So there are a good number of motivations for buying boards from someone instead of getting them made yourself, even given the design files.

I don't think there's much (if anything) that you can learn from looking at board design files instead of physical boards. Maybe a few "how did they get eagle to make that?!" type questions, but that's uncommon (and for castellated pads, the policy on making them and what you need to give varies between board houses, so in the most interesting case, the design file alone doesn't cover it) - and even when it does apply, it doesn't always tell you how to tell eagle to do whatever it is.

IMO, most of what you learn from examining a design you can get from a physical board and a schematic. I recommend scrapping electronics you don't want anymore (don't bother with PCs - they're boring inside, everything is too complex for casual examination) and examining their PCBs, identifying parts, looking at how they laid it out, trying to figure out how it worked (sometimes I draw out schematics). Once I was taking apart an obsolete enterprise class network switch, and there was this cute little board with all the blinkenlights above the ports - started looking at it, tracing it out, and half an hour later, I had it lit up, controlled by an Espruino.

What is helpful to get from people is their component libraries. These seem to be shared a little bit more freely than good board designs. On the other hand, if you're able to find most of the libraries you need, you can end up curtailing your projects when you can't get a library for the part you want and aren't comfortable making component libraries - when it's really not that hard.

If anyone's interested, @DrAzzy's store is: https://www.tindie.com/stores/DrAzzy/

As @DrAzzy says, custom PCBs take a few weeks to arrive usually, so if you want something now, which you usually do, it's better to pay a little extra and buy direct :)

Also, if you've tried to compile Open Source software off GitHub, you'll find it often takes a few tweaks to get it working. When each tweak costs you at least $20 and takes 2 weeks, suddenly the option of just buying something off the shelf that works looks a lot more appealing!

If you're interested, there are a lot of PCB designs posted up here: http://dirtypcbs.com/store/designer/pcbs­

I'm not 100% sure if they're downloadable, but it's interesting to see what's there. Also Adafruit are pretty amazing and do Open Source all their PCB designs, even if it's sometimes a bit hard to find them on GitHub: https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-Fea­ther-M0-Basic-Proto-PCB

I think when working on software, generally all you're losing is your time. Pretty much always designing hardware will require you to spend money (although often not that much) - but maybe just having spent any money at all developing something makes you less willing to share it for free.

Just to add: there are upsides to Open Sourcing your hardware, but for me at least there are downsides too:

• I've had a company in China making 'clone' Espruino boards
  
• I've had people try and beat me down on price by saying "well, I could just get 1000 of these made in China for less as I have the design" (if anyone's thinking about it, good luck - it's harder than just emailing a company the GitHub URL :)
  
• There have been a bunch of cases where people have copied the Espruino schematic, laid it out in a different layout, and then used it for their own products with the Espruino software - obviously I make absolutely nothing from that at all.
  
  

Having said that, we can't kid ourselves. Most of the hardware individuals produce will be 2 layer. It's trivial to reverse engineer (unsolder the components, stick it in a scanner, photoshop and trace) - however it does take a lot of time. By not open-sourcing the design files you're basically just stopping the lazy copycats - anyone who really cared could still copy it.

It's trivial to reverse engineer (unsolder the components, stick it in a scanner, photoshop and trace) - however it does take a lot of time.

Or give a board and $75 to these gentlemen in china - they're professionals. http://dirtypcbs.com/store/reverse_engin­eering

Still - when you give out the design files, you invite people to copy your work, whereas it takes more dedication to have them cloned like that.

Yes, totally. You've really got to want to clone it, whereas otherwise you can just upload a file to OSHPark and get a PCB back :)