After breaking my head ove the circuit for hours, I decided that it indeed is not the end of thew world to use a jump wire or two...

I guess people sometimes have to let go of the perfectionist nature that is inherent in humans...

Thanks a lot for all the help...

__________________
Bharath Bhushan Lohray.
M.Sc. Electronics.

 

If it bothers you, then don't use a 'jump wire', use a zero ohm resistor instead, then no one will know :lol:

Are you manually routing the board?, or using an auto-router to do it?, if you are using an auto-router, try doing it yourself instead.

__________________
PIC programmer software, and PIC Tutorials at:
http://www.winpicprog.co.uk

 

Nigel :lol:
an RF circuit will know :shock: :twisted:
I just have to remind you that extra leads of the resistor equal inductance/more resistance, unless the solder touches the resistor itself. I am not going to take this idea for RF circuits. I recommend a jump wire myself. In fact, use 2, 3, or even 4 jump wires bunch together.

I think one objective of making a halfway decent circuit is to avoid unwanted resistances.

You should think of widths as resistance divisors. Let's say each track being 1mm in width is 10 ohms per meter (I'm picking numbers here).
if the width is 2mm, then ohms law says the resistance is 5 ohms. 3mm = 3.333... ohms, 4mm = 0.25 ohms, etc.

I do 99% of my circuitry manually when I do circuits.
Manual is better. You will avoid bugs made by the programmer of the software. Also, manual allows you to connect the parts any way you want, AND you won't have to fix whatever mistakes the computer has made, with respect to your design.

__________________
-=: The best low-priced components to troubleshoot with are the speaker and the LED :=-

 

A zero ohm resistor IS a jumper wire, just with a shaped body fitted around it, so it can be inserted by component insertion machines. There's no need to use multiple jumpers unless you have a high current requirement.

__________________
PIC programmer software, and PIC Tutorials at:
http://www.winpicprog.co.uk

 

I did think of the zero ohm resistor... to fox my teacher who insists on optimizing any given circuit a "bit more" to have no jumper wires...

I do a manual routing of close and obvious routs...and leave the long distance routes to the grid router. This way, the routing is faster as the router does not touch the existing tracks. The router several times made a mess of routing the nearest points. One of the nearby traces went all round the board before connecting to the final point...

However the autorouter does not recognize resistance values. Only resistors. So the two terminals of the zero ohm resistor is considered in two different nets. This creates more problems that what it solves. As some nodes on both sides of the resistors are in the same net. So the router attempts more complex routings and makes a more complex mess.

My software is Dip Trace (http://www.diptrace.com/) freeware edition. It allows upto 250 pins. And was the best software I could get after a lot of long head breaking sessions with a dozen softwares that I evaluated...

__________________
Bharath Bhushan Lohray.
M.Sc. Electronics.

 

I'd suggest you eas yourself over to eagle... I know it can certainly be "head-breaking" when you get started, those crazy germans sure didn't make the interface nearly as intuitive as it should have been, but once you get used to it it's really not hard at all...

generally when I need jumper wires I just design the board as a 2-layer board... anywhere I wish to have a jumper, I go up to the top layer, over the traces I need to cross, and then back down... then I etch the board as a single-layer board (bottom layer only) and simply put jumpers in place of each of the top-layer tracks.

For using the autorouter, I generally do a bunch by hand, then maybe let the autorouter run and see what it comes up with, and then I edit the autorouted tracks manually until they look like what I want... shortening them, rerouting, and adding jumpers as needed. But on a lot of my boards I don't use the autorouter at all... generally unless it's something with a lot of buses (like in a digital logic or microcontroller circuit where you might have an 8-bit bus running between a few chips), there isn't too much need for an autorouter.

But I promised myself to always allow myself a few jumpers when I had spent several hours trying to get a certain board optimized to a single side with no jumpers, when I realized that it would take me 2 minutes to solder in a jumper or two, thereby saving myself a lot of time tearing my hair out on the design instead.

__________________
EEgeek.net

 

I'm against eagle. I tried it once, and I didn't like its autorouting, or appearance of the components. It made me think that the 1st and subsequent printouts will be bad.

I am sticking with IVEX winboard.

why?
What I do is create a jumper piece and use it. All it is is two drill holes about 0.2mm apart.


I drill holes right through on a single sided board, and fit the jumper in place.

I go manual.

I won't use an autorouter unless I expect extra mistakes. In other words, I don't use it.

I guess it will work. Just watch with the jumpers at RF. even a millimeter of wire can have an impact on the frequency. In fact, I am totally against putting a closed jumper and an inductor in series unless the jumper can be opened or closed by the end user.

__________________
-=: The best low-priced components to troubleshoot with are the speaker and the LED :=-

 

but you also say you don't actually use autorouting. personally I don't mind the appearance of components in the schematic, and the PCB printout is the important part anyway... and that comes out fine as long as you set the DPI high enough on the bitmap.

go for it, not to be a jerk, but I wasn't talking to you, you wouldn't listen to me anyway :lol: I was suggesting eagle to lord loh, since he said that his software limited him to 250 pins.

I don't do that because it divides one net into two, so you have to show it in the schematic (which looks messy) and you have to put it in just the right place in the schematic... if you shuffle stuff around, you'll have to move the jumper both on the board, and in the schematic... that's annoying. using the top layer for "virtual jumpers", you still get two holes to use for a jumper, and you can make it any size and shape you want, without having to make a new footprint every time.

yes, I do that too... when you go from bottom to top layer, it inserts a Via, which is exactly the same as a normal solder pad for a component...

yes, but then again practically anything you do in your PCB design affects things at RF... after all, a PCB trace is still a form of wire as well. in reality, if you are dealing with RF stuff that's sensitive enough to be totally messed up by a small bit of wire, it would probably be wiser to be using a 2-layer board with significant ground planes in the first place.

__________________
EEgeek.net

 

evandude, I recently read a post on this forum, where someone said that his mother board buses were twisted and looped and deliberately made long. The reply he got was that it was done to make all the bits reach the destination at almost the same time by giving each trace the same amount od inductive effect instead of making some traces of a bus short while other long. DipTrace bus routing did no such thing. I do not need such a precision as I am not designing a high speed bus... just trying....

About eagle...(freeware)
http://www.cadsoftusa.com/freeware.htm
It enforces a So 250 pins limitation is fine... I used two boards with connectors between them.

DipTrace is more intutive...So I feel. (http://www.diptrace.com/) the software is about 7 Mb.

I have finished designing 5 of the 7 boards required for my project.

__________________
Bharath Bhushan Lohray.
M.Sc. Electronics.

 

I tried photo paper and also used .4 mm tracks...

Photo paper (Kodak) give me no appreciable difference at least in the .4 mm scale except that the paper was harder to pulp up and remove after the transfer.

I transferred the image on to the smooth side (or should I have done it onto the rough side?)

Any suggestions?

__________________
Bharath Bhushan Lohray.
M.Sc. Electronics.

 

Photo paper isn't perfect. If you cant' get press-n-peel and you don't want to do the UV exposure method, then you will probably be stuck with larger traces. You could try more brands of photo paper, I'm sure with google you could find some recommendations for paper type, but I think it will involve a lot of trial and error.

__________________
EEgeek.net

 

there are two other methods which I have done.

WAX: Cover the entire copper board with wax and leave the wax on the sections you dont want etched.

MARKER: Draw your design with a thin black permanent marker, and etch the board.

I found that after using the UV method, the above two methods wasted my time.

__________________
-=: The best low-priced components to troubleshoot with are the speaker and the LED :=-