Eagle has more layers than that we’ll also need to work with negative layers. You already know how copper, soldermask, and silkscreen works. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably already made a board with Eagle, and you’ve ordered those boards from OSHPark or Seeed or Elecrow. This tutorial assumes a working knowledge of Eagle. To do that, we need to understand layers in Eagle, and how those layers are turned into a PCB. With that, we’re ready to start creating bitmaps to import into Eagle. Reducing the size of the Tindie head, and bumping up the resolution to 300 ppi From there, it’s simply a matter of bringing this vector art over to Photoshop or your raster editor of choice, adjusting the size of the art to the size of the final PCB, and bumping the resolution up to 300 pixels per inch. Below are a few swatches showing what colors are available in a blue PCB from any random Chinese board house: The colors available on a standard blue PCB from a random Chinese board houseįrom here, it’s just a matter of taking the vector art of the Tindie head and changing the colors around. With that said, let’s continue with the working example. There are better ways to do this including an SVG import, but this is the fast, easy, and foolproof way. For each layer of the board, import a BMP into Eagle.īasically, this process relies heavily on Eagle’s ability to import bitmap files.Alternatively, import a bitmap of the entire image and trace around the board with a milling line. Import the outline of the board into Eagle.
Bonus points for creating a vector outline of the board. We’re basically doing a spot process here.
This is the fast and easy way to do things if you want a KiCad tutorial, check out ’s work, or my overly-involved multiple silkscreen process for KiCad. Secondly, this is Eagle, and I’m going to do the majority of the work with a BMP import. Firstly, I’ll be using a blue solder mask, although the same technique can be applied to green, red, yellow, white, or black soldermask. A few months ago, took a portrait of yours truly, changed the colors to what is available on a normal OSHPark PCB, and turned that into different layers in KiCad. This also gives me an opportunity to demonstrate my workflow for creating artistic boards in Eagle.Įffectively, what I’ll be demonstrating here is the creation of the Benchoff Nickel. I’m not really happy with the first version of this badge, though, and this is an opportunity to improve my design. We could just do another run, and order a few more PCBs from the Gerbers I’ve already designed. The second run meant ordering a thousand PCBs. But as of right now we’ve already handed out our entire stock, that means we need to build more. We’ll be handing out a few of these blinky badges at upcoming events. This badge was such a rousing success, it’s now official Tindie swag. The badges were a complete success, they introduced soldering to a lot of people, and were loved by all. , the queen bee of Tindie, and I designed, developed, and kitted three hundred Tindie badges in ten days leading up to DEF CON. Last month I had the pleasure of creating a new piece of hardware for Tindie.