I need a 26mm driver board, it can be an old dead driver or a bare / stripped board. All it needs to have a center contact (for batt+) and a ground ring on the same side but thats the only real stipulations, I can work with anything else.
26mm seems to be a strange size so if the ground ring is thick enough I could file down a slightly larger (say <28mm) one but again the ground ring would need to be wide enough I'm not filing it off.
I can buy it but I have tons of stuff to trade as well, emitters, OSHPark boards, components...
thanks guys! Learning Eagle is high up on my to do list, I’ve even been downloading .lib files when I come across them in datasheets and on parts sites but I’m too busy and off the deep end on other stuff I’m still learning myself I cant take it on right now.
What I’ve never really understood is why we use solid contact boards instead of ones with a big cutout for the driver. 26mm for 20mm driver 26mm for 17mm driver
18mm hole for 20mm driver w/ 1mm of overlap. 2mm wide exposed copper area leaves 1mm for soldering iron.
To me that makes for a much cleaner install, but nobody seems to be doing it. Even if you make a sloppy job of it and it doesn’t look clean, at least it’s lower profile and has less wires involved.
Silly question…what driver would you drop into a SRK, a 26mm to 46mm driver? Interesting
I remember someone a while back saying they were kinda fragile or something and/or trying to get OSHPark to cut out the center was a bit tricky…let hope these boards come made right…that would be so awesome!
This is the contact board. You can even adapt the setup to the given space and solder the driver on the inside or the outside of the contact board, depending on whether you need more space in the driver hole or on the battery side.
I’m new to PCB design, so 2 questions come to mind.
When I order this, is the inner 18mm part loose or do I need to saw it out?
Is the outer ring completely copper plated but partially unexposed? At first glance it seems there is no contact between the copper plated parts.
Thanks for designing this.
Oshpark’s project creation process says that they do not officially support cutouts but that they “usually” work anyway. That’s probably what you are thinking of. The specs page says that they officially support cutouts and that’s the one to believe.
For an SRK the diameter of the driver he wants to use along with the contact plate really doesn’t matter, the battery + ring must be very large so an SRK should really use a traditional contact plate. That’s getting pretty expensive for a contact plate though…
Plus IOS and FT both sell 20mm contact boards.
even though it’s been up recently I’d already forgotten about your tutorial. Of course that’s a more truly budget option than mine! Thanks for reminding us. If you had leftover sheet copper or scraps of copper pipe to unroll I suppose they could also be used with a little extra grunt work.
Thanks HarleyQuin. It is not obvious from the Oshpark renders, but both sides are 100% flooded with copper. The vias are plated of course, but the center cutout is not plated. Oshpark specs don’t allow that. Of course that’s only an aesthetic problem, there is plenty of electrical path by way of the vias. I guess I should have specified for it to be plated and waited to see what happens - they’d cut the hole whether they plate it or not. The purple areas are covered in resist, it’s there primarily to help keep from making a mess while soldering. With the resist ring you should be able to keep solder away from the ledge for a nice clean fit in a driver pocket.
You should not need to cut out the center. It’s drawn on the renders, but you shouldn’t receive it. It is marked to be cut out with a milling tool and it does not have tabs to keep it in place.
Thank you very much, wight, that clears matters up for me.
I fiddled around with pipe tube parts in the past, like adding several concentrical rings to a 17mm driver. It works, it’s budget, but your approach is way better.
I downloaded Eagle in the meantime, but it seems you have a different file format. Is there a software (preferably free) to make or alter these PCB designs? You just opened a can of worms here. I can well use the 26mm variante, but I could need 23.7mm (Maxtoch HI6X-17) and 22mm (Ultrafire F10). Oh this might come in handy…
Edit:
This had been my approach till now, yours is slightly more sophisticated…
PCB manufacturing uses a format called Gerber. That’s what those files are. I did use Eagle to produce those layouts, the appropriate files for Eagle are .brd files: http://photo.jesusthepirate.com/blf/26mm_contact_board/
Note that v4 are what I shared on Oshpark. v6 uses an unsupported drill size to create a large via (plated hole) instead of a routed hole. v6 may or may not actually work The PCB house used by Oshpark specifically does not support plated slots on these boards, but who knows if you could get away with specifying a giant drill hit (16-18mm) and via.
Wow, thx for the link to the brd-files, I was able to open these in Eagle (v6, though).
The program is, well, err, mildly intuitive… but I was already able to move some vias.
I found Mattaus Eagle Tutorial, that’s exactly what I need right now.
I’m thinking of placing the vias closer to the center and all copper visible, so I could grind down any 26mm board to a needed size. Still easier than my last approach or having 18 and a half different board sizes to design.
Your board looks slightly different in Eagle than at Oshpark. So you designed them in Eagle, how did you upload them, as .brd or somehow pre-converted?
At Oshpark other boards are sometimes .zip (Gerber?) but also sometimes .brd, that still puzzles me.
To make gerber files out of eagle brd files you use Eagle’s CAM processor. Oshpark has an Eagle CAM processor built into their site, so it is possible to upload .brd files directly. When sending to other places you typically must provide gerber files. Doing the CAM processing yourself helps make sure that the Eagle file is interpreted the way you want.
I did intend to link you to Mattaus’s Eagle tutorial, but I forgot. Good thing you found it yourself.
Eagle’s presentation of boards is different from Oshpark’s. For one thing, Eagle shows you the mirror view of the bottom side, Oshpark does not. Not such a big deal here of course since the whole board is symmetrical
Leaving off the solder mask is fine. I actually took it off myself and then put it back for the reason I mentioned above - to clean up the soldering process a bit. Note that you can move items parametrically by right clicking and editing the Properties of any given item. That will allow you to directly set the X and Y coordinates for precision placement.
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