good and cheap

[Carl]

I am looking into doing a small board for a buddy of mine who is a contractor, and I am looking for a way to do it cheap where I can get the board and assembly data. Of course using my company's software would be a conflict of interest, so I need software. Does anyone have any suggestions on what I could use for this one time board that won't put me in the red for doing the job? Is Dip Trace any good?

thanks

[Gizzmo]

http://www.freepcb.com/

http://www.rdrop.com/~cary/mirror/tools_htmlized.html#PCB

just to name a few....

[Bodhran1]

There's a quick turn (cheap) board shop called PCB Express.

They supply a freeware tool for designing board. When finished your design is locked into their shop.

One of the sparkies here used to use it for ham radio stuff.

I'm not sure what kind of assembly info you get out of it?



I don't know the address but I'm sure you can Google it?


Dave

[Carl]

:cool: Free PCB looks pretty cool! I'm definately going to give that a try. Another one that seems pretty cheap is Eagle. Has anyone ever tried that??

PCB123 is a good suggestion, but I want the gerbers to be transferable, so thats not so good.

The other thing that is crossing my mind is how I'm goign to get placement data to whatever assembly house we use on this thing. Please any other suggestions are appreciated, thanks for your help!

[Gizzmo]

:cool: Free PCB looks pretty cool! I'm definately going to give that a try. Another one that seems pretty cheap is Eagle. Has anyone ever tried that??

PCB123 is a good suggestion, but I want the gerbers to be transferable, so thats not so good.

The other thing that is crossing my mind is how I'm goign to get placement data to whatever assembly house we use on this thing. Please any other suggestions are appreciated, thanks for your help!

I've heard about the Eagle software a lot, never really any reviews, but if you pay something for it you should get some support which is always nice perhaps....