Getting PCBs made is fun and cheap, they’ll let you draw whatever you want on there, and the cops can’t stop you.

They aren't trying to.

I think the real blocker is having the knowledge design your own pcb, or even implement a pre designed one.

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I agree. Now lets talk 80% lowers and such

I put off learning how to do this until just last month because I thought it would be hard but it was actually really quick to learn. I followed this tutorial and it only took a few days to design my board having never done it before.

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I used to work in the PCB industry, I didn’t know anyone was stopping you especially the police?

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I don’t think this guys job is in jeopardy

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It's too easily confused with idiocy, which is rampant.

That's just like, your opinion, man

My own limitations can

No, but my incompetence will.

The article is mostly about getting fun PCBs printed for mechanical keyboards and the like. No one sane is out there designing and printing PCBs like what you described for fun.

This response is like if I talked about trying to do some lithography with a photo resist and they feel the need to explain why I can't make a 12th generation Intel core chip in my basement because I'm not ASML.

Awesome, I have a robotics class and I was hoping when I was done with my final project that I'd print my own pcb and finalize it into something more permanent

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You can bottle your own water, and nobody can stop you!

They can't stop me from licking all of them, too.

Eh. I’m EE adjacent, but have run into some young people who do need to be corrected when they want to run a ~100MHz digital signal across a bread board.

People should have rough, order-of-magnitude, notions of when the magic and the deep-magic start.

That said, the top poster may have some confidence issues that caused them to boast on a random message board.

You walk into a police station with a custom anime waifu keyboard PCB and see what happens…

No seriously let us know what they say I’m curious.

Just only do it at night with your curtains closed and you’ll be good

> No one sane is out there designing and printing PCBs like what you described for fun.

Yes we are. And it's only getting more prominent as it gets easier to do.

Prison?

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No one is stopping web sites from making click bait headlines, either :)

Now I just need to figure out/learn how to create a custom keyboard pcb from scratch on my own and I might try to create one in the future...

Straight to jail

Believe it or not, straight to jail

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Bring out the zip ties, bois. Alright, hands behind your back.

I used to use Visio (it had circuit design tools) for some stuff.

At school we had custom software to do it, but applying of the transfers and the etching of the boards was done by us with the usual chemicals.

>Now that you have your art on a board, you’re going to have to find a company that manufactures PCBs

It seems to me like I've been successfully stopped from printing circuit boards by this clickbait article. It's about how to design and send a board somewhere to get it manufactured, not about printing it yourself.

My closest approach to printing a board myself was to print guide lines it using a 3D printer and hammering in some copper.

Who’s trying to stop me?

I printed my own PCBs a decade ago. Not only can you get them done in china, you can simple etch your own right at home (though it will turn out crappy).

If you can design a basic schematic, you can design a basic PCB. And if you can open and understand schematics for some development boards, you can design a basic schematic.

That being said - it's still way beyond the skill level of an average guy. Sure, it doesn't actually require a PHD - but most people don't even know how to use an Arduino board.

But for those who want to get into hobby electronics or even embedded proper? There's never been a better time to do so.

Cheap and capable PCB fabs, free open source design and simulation tools, downloadable datasheets, open SDKs, readily available components and hardware tools and plentiful resources on how to use all of that. 20 years ago this just didn't exist. 40 years ago, "hobbyist PCB" involved hand drawing the traces, manually etching copper with corrosive chemicals and drilling all the holes - for projects that today would be considered basic.

It's not that hard to make a board, but what use do 99% of people have for their own pcb? And then the problem comes when you try to sell it actually designing for rf regulations is legit phd level voodoo work.

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I said sane people. Crazy people can do what they want.

I started off my career after college as a hardware engineer. I loved prototyping (although analog design wasn't my thing). I ended up moving in a different direction career wise, but today I'm always amazed by the level and sophistication of open source tools for simulation and design. You could DIY back in the day too, but like anything else CAD tools and existing fab options got to the point where just about anyone with a bit of training could have a professionally crafted PCB built at a very low cost.

Best part about chickens? They just shit out eggs, and you can just take them and sell them for money, how mad is that?

Unless you get that water from the sky.

Then they can, at least in some jurisdictions.

Guitar pedal PCB building is really big. Get everything in a box and the PCB has labels for all of the components

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I mean, Reddit does seem to have a hard on for giving borrowed money to institutions that have no intention of helping them or delivering on promises. This fetish seems to present itself most when someone suggests that a task or procedure is actually very cheap and/or simple to perform oneself. Making such a suggestion tends to bring people out of the woodwork, furious that you would be so irresponsible/ignorant that you wouldn’t want to pay a ‘specialist’ exorbitant prices for whatever service.

I mean, don’t you know that without a PHD in electric engineering you’re going to burn down your apartment complex and only violent extremists would want to make their own circuit boards??

You can also make single layer PCBs at home using etching solution and a Sharpie to draw the circuit. Or a laser printer to print onto a transparency sheet, and using an iron to transfer the toner onto the copper side or PCB.