Common Breakout Boards

I recently started to get my hands dirty again in electronics designs. However, if you have tried following electronics as a hobby, you might already know that it is not cheap. The main problem with electronics is it’s not easy to source components and then manufacture the PCB. Actually, it’s not difficult, it’s just time consuming and costly.

Once you designed the schematic and before you transfer the design to a PCB, it’s always better to make sure that all your design decisions are correct. Otherwise, you’ll have to re-spin the PCB and worse re-order the components. I exclusively use Digikey for my orders, however, I always ensure that my order is more that 60 AUD. That way I can avoid a 25 AUD shipping cost.

The other cost is the PCB manufacturing cost. Eventhough the PCB manufacturing cost is just 2 AUD from China, it takes around 15 AUD to get it shipped. If you have messed up a single pin, it means you have to spend another ~100 AUD to redo the design.

I know, things have improved so much over last couple of years. However, still I don’t want to spend so much for a hobby. Therefore, as a prudent Engineer I designed breakout boards for most of the common IC footprints and got them manufactured early on. Whenever, I want to order a PCB, I make sure that I get the maximum out of that non-recurring shipping cost.

This is the first board that I manufactured. Please feel free to get some of these manufactured if you want.

The first breakout contains:

• LQFP64
• LQFP48
• LQFP32
• MSOP8
• SOP8
• SOIC16
• SSOP20
• SOT6
• SOT23
• 1206
• 0602
• 0805

KiCAD project and the gerbers can be found here