Howto: Etch your own circuit board
Step Six: Drilling and installing components
Don’t worry, all the hard work is done. Drilling holes in PCBs gets a bad rap, but its really a piece of cake. I use a dremel tool but a drill press will work as well. A hand drill is not recommended unless absolutely necissary. The key to drilling PCB’s is to use the highest speed setting on your drill and use the right size drill bit. Resistors, small capacitors, integrated circuits, and most other components should be drilled with a 1/32″ bit. Higher power components use 3/64″ or larger. If you have the right size drill bit you should NEVER have to drill through copper. If you notice flakes of copper coming off of your drill bit you should use a smaller bit. Also, since these bits are so small they can easily bend or snap. To avoid this, leave only a small amount of bit protruding from your drill. PCB’s are thin so there is not need to have more than a centimeter of bit exposed.
I set the board on top of an old phone book and simply punch through each of the holes. The outline of the trace around each hole tends to guide the bit into position so its hard to make a mistake. Drilling PCB’s does tend to dull your bits quickly so if drilling gets difficult after a few boards you may need a new bit.
Now simply install your components. First solder on the smallest components and work your way up to the larger ones. Like circuit design, soldering is out of the scope of this article. I assume most people reading about printing their own circuit boards are already competent with a soldering iron.
Cross your fingers, add a power source and test it out!
If it works- Congratulations!
If not, grab a multimeter and start troubleshooting. Good luck! 
What next?
The sky is the limit! You can experiment with two sided boards, larger boards, or even different shapes of boards. Or do what this guy did and build a machine to automatically agitate the etching solution. Awesome!
One last tip: Keep in mind that Eagle allows you to output bitmap images instead of printing directly to a printer. This allows you bypass the board size limitations imposed by the student version of the software. Simply design your board in “modules”, output them as bitmaps, then load them in image editing software for the final touches. This is exactly what I did to create my inverted pendulum which is far larger than any board size allowed by Eagle.
Be safe! Have fun! And build something amazing!
-Eric
Links
Cadsoft Online (Eagle software)
Etching guide on Instructables
PCB etching machine (Awesome!)
Chemical information about etching with CuCl
Tags: howto, howto etch circuit guide
December 22nd, 2008 at 11:39 pm
[...] The board/circuit diagram can be downloaded here. I included inputs/outputs for a few more buttons and a few LEDs in case you want to implement some extra controls. Use eagle to open the files. If you want to etch the board you can do so using my etching howto. [...]