Designing and building your own board

Manufacturing the Board

To manufacture the board, you first need to find a manufacturer, generate the design files, and email your files. These files are generally in Gerber format. Tutorials for generating Gerber files are available from TinySine [6] and DFRobot [7]. The first time is scary, but you'll quickly get the hang of it.

TinySine – The Manufacturer

I have done a lot of manufacturing both in the US and overseas in the past 20 years. In all that time, however, I never had to source a small PCB board with SMD parts, so I went on a search. After contacting several companies in Asia, Europe, and the US, I decided to use a company called TinySine [8] in mainland China that provided PCB prototype services and full board manufacturing (Figure 5). They were very price competitive, and I really liked their process regarding prototyping, feedback, and quality. The folks at TinySine are superb.

Figure 5: The TinySine logo.

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