Olimex advice for Eagle users
Here follows some advice based on my experience of using Olimex for PCB prototypes.
Olimex are the cheapest and most helpful board house I've found, and I
highly recommend them.
General advice
If making a small board, try if possible to make it panelize onto an SS panel
rather than an SQ, as it is cheaper to order 4 SS panels than 1 SSQ.
(You get a 20% 'repeat
order' discount for 3 of the SS panels, even if they are all ordered
together.)
Make sure you have the 'Always vector font' option in the 'user
interface' settings switched on.
Olimex have some advice for
avoiding their 'silk screen' fix charge.
They also have
instructions for generating gerber and so on.
Generally I:
- Save board/schematic with a -ss prefix
- Run OlimexAllSilk.ulp
- Run drillcfg.ulp
- Goto CAM processor
- Run excellon-rack.cam, giving it the rack just generated by drillcfg.
- Run gerb274x.cam
- Use pentalogix viewmate to view the generated files
Advice for single sided boards
When doing single side boards, the eagle libraries use lots of 0.8mm drills
- this isn't a standard drill for olimex so they will charge you $1.30. Just
pay this; it's usually not worth the hassle to avoid it.
If you really insist on avoid this charge, you have two choices:
- Use restring to increase the pad sizes, then use a drill rack without a
0.8mm drill, and make sure the tolerances cause the 0.8mm holes to be
increased to 0.9mm.
- Follow the instructions below for changing drill sizes for double sided
boards, and change the 0.8mm drills to 0.9mm ones.
Advice for double side boards
For double sided boards, Eagle will give you the required hole side in the
final board, but olimex require the hole size before plating.
It is a bit fiddly to do this, see our HOWTO
for adjusting drill sizes.
Joseph Heenan, joseph@heenan.me.uk