Beginner Questions

Question

I recently sent my first circuit board off to OSH Park and the prototypes came back. I made several mistakes that I think any regular user of Eagle software would not make.

First, the titling is nearly invisible. Just font color changes?
Second, the mounting holes appear as dimples in the top layer. Any idea how to get them to be through holes?
Finally, the mounting holes for resisters are much too close together. I can fix that by measuring the the resistors. The library provides 0.1 inch centers.

Thanks in advance for any advice in addressing 1 and 2.

autodeskguest · Answer

On 08/10/2019 20:38, Perry Sugerman wrote: Here is a picture of the board. Bottom surface of Dual Control Switch Driver. The holes in the very corners are intended to be insulated mounting holes. Instead they are gold dots. What did you use to define those "mounting holes"? They're definitely too small to be useful What you want is a hole, using the HOLE tool, of about 3mm diameter (or 0.12" or 120mil) or more. The board house may plate it through unless you instruct them not to, but since Eagle will treat a hole as something to avoid, there won't be any copper connecting to it. I'm guessing you didn't have a good feel for the scale of things when you placed them, as they're a bit too close to the corners for proper mounting holes. On your first issue, about "the titling", are you referring to the text "Dual Control Switch Driver" and "PerryAire"? If so, you've drawn them in copper, on layer 1. There's nothing wrong with that but it will lead to relatively low contrast, especially if you allow the ground plane to flood around in into them. You can avoid the latter by placing a keep-out rectangle around the text, or a "cut-out" polygon. However, you're probably better off simply moving them to the tNames or tPlace layer to get them silk screen printed in white. On your third issue, the resistors all seem to be in the "0204/2V" package, which is the first one in the list for R-EU_ and R-US_ in the standard libraries. It's intended for a small resistor mounted vertically. You probably wanted the "0207/12" or similar, for horizontal mounting.