/diy/ - Do It Yourself

>>2774586
Get your free copper.
If you’re etching it at home, preserve your etchant.
Ground surround shielding, moar current carrying capacity, etc.

>>2762111
Watch dave jones exploration of modern autorouting. It’s not much better than it was in the 80s. Maybe worse.
You’re not supposed to just autoroute a whole board and ship it.
You just auto-route parts of it which may be repetitive, look at it, and fix it up.
Or fix glaring auto-placement errors, and let it auto-route from there. Or, manually place and route the critical parts, and let it autoroute ancillary support components.

Although I’m sure modern zoomers just directly ship 100% ChatGPT code for critical life-safety systems now. Good for population control.

Similarly, I see lots of seemingly 100% auto-routed boards, with vast unused areas and complete nonsense, like placing a single inductor on the other side of a board for a buck downconverter. It’s laughable. And in quantities of 1 million, that matters a lot. Especially when the stupid auto-router needs a 2 or 4 layer board for one trace out of a thousand on the .1 rev.

> charged for copper
Exacty… you’re not charged for it.
Get and receive your free copper! That’s *your* copper they are keeping.

>>2691376
> why solder bath?
It replaces the plating process with a process you already have.it’s also usually cheaper. Who wants a whole separate plating line? The current/heat capacity are added bonuses, it’s sometimes done intentionally on high power devices. See picrel for a similar approach.

>>2654711
You should always use polygonal pours everywhere you can to maximize your FREE COPPER that you’re paying for.

Unless you’ve got a HV clearance or capacitance issue.