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Arduino Dev PCB Using Seeed

Fusion PCB Service



I have been mainly using perf-boards for my electronics
projects. Since most of the stuff I build are not very
complicated and are one-offs, using perf-boards has been
more than adequate. With that said, I did find wiring the
headers in my Arduino projects to be a big pain and
depending on the number of break-out pins needed to be
wired this could be quite time consuming and error-prone
as well. Since I have heard many good things about Seeed
Studios Fusion PCB Service, I decided to give it a try.
My design goal was to cram as much circuitry as I could
onto the 5cm by 5cm board as that is the cheapest option. I
also wanted to use a through-hole only design as it is a lot
easier for building prototypes. Since many of the ICs I
integrate with use either I2C or SPI protocols, I also
decided to breakout dedicated I2C and SPI ports. To
program the MCU I wanted to have the option of using
either the standard ICSP or via serial port using
theadapter I built.
With these goals in mind, I came up with the following
design:

Arduino Dev Board
For the PCB design, I basically just chose the maximum
design area to be 5cm x 5cm. I also debated whether to
add mounting holes or not. At the end I decided to go
without the mount holes as I rarely use them. By
eliminating the mounting holes, I ended up having slightly
more space for the headers. Anyway, here is the PCB
design (I turned off the outline layer so that the traces can
be viewed more easily).

PCB Design
The design files (a zipped file containing .GBL .GBO .GBP
.GBS .GML .GTL .GTL .GTP .GTS and .TXT) were submitted
on 12/24 last month and three days later the order status
was updated to shipped.
The shipping service Seeed uses (Hong Kong air mail) is not
the fastest. After three weeks of waiting, I finally received a
box from them last Saturday. Packed inside the box is a
sealed bubble wrap package which contains my 10 PCBs:

Packaging
The quality of the PCB is quite excellent (of course for this
simple circuit design, this is more or less to be expected),
the silk screen looks pretty decent as well. It does appear
that the some of the font sizes used for silk screen are
slightly larger than the ones I specified, but it is close
enough. According to Fusion services website, the boards
are supposedly 50% e-tested. The probe marks on some of
the test pads suggest that this is indeed the case.

PCB1

PCB2
Here is a populated Arduino dev board:

PCB populated
And here is a picture showing the dev board and an Arduino
Duemilanove side by side:

comparison
Download
Gerber files: ArduinoDev.zip

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