Designing Your Board

To understand how to use components from our library on your board it is important to understand a little about the rationale behind creating the library. We designed the library to ensure compatibility between the footprints in the library and specific parts in our inventory, and to ensure that certain design rule checks are met, such as proper courtyarding between parts. The use of the library also allows us to automatically generate a bill of materials from your design. We use the relationships our system has encoded between footprints, symbols, and parts in our inventory along with the information you've included in the Value text of each component to find matching components. We will cover more about component matching throughout the following sections.

If you have a particular component in mind to use in your design, you can search for it in our component search tool and find the entries in our library that fit that particular part. In the search result for each part you will see the library, device set, and package to use so that we can manufacture your board with the component you selected.

Our AI inspects your board design and uses the device set, package, and Value text of each component in your design to identify the specific part from our inventory that best satisfies the intentions of your design. For these reasons you should use the Value text in Eagle for each component to specify the various parameters of the part you want to use. For instance, you can specify 22k ohms 1% in the Value text if your design calls for a resistor with 22 kilo-ohms and with 1% tolerance. You can even simply specify 22k 1% and because the footprint you used is for a resistor (at least it is in this hypothetical scenario) our AI will assume that you mean 22 kilo-ohms.

We are continuously expanding our inventory and adding components to our library to expand our manufacturing capabilities but it is possible you will find that parts you would like to use are not in our inventory or covered by our library. In these cases you can request that specific components be added to our library via our site's contact form. Please include as much information as possible (i.e. the manufacturer, part number, and package name) in your message.

When designing your board it's important to be aware of the design rule checks that we will run against your board during our checkout process. Following is a non-exhaustive list of our design rule checks.

Layer count

We are currently only accepting 2 and 4 layer boards.

Board size

Your board must fit within a 10-inch by 10-inch box.

Autodesk Eagle specific checks

We recommend that you load our design rules into Eagle. This will help make sure you stay within the bounds of our manufacturing specs while you design your board. You can download our rules here and load them into Eagle by opening the DRC window from the Tools dropdown in Eagle then loading the file you downloaded. This blog post explains how to interact with design rule checks in Eagle.

FlashPCB Library usage

We require that components from the FlashPCB Library be used as is without any manipulation. If you would like to edit the components from the FlashPCB library you will have to save them under a different library name in order to use them in your designs. Keep in mind that we will not be able to populate any components that do not use the FlashPCB library.

Part placement

Our library encodes information that is used by our design rule checks to validate part placement. This information is contained within the following layers in Eagle:

Board border is continuous

We check that your board has a continuous border. If you have two boards in the same file, we require that you separate them into separate files and upload them separately.

Minimum drill and end mill size

We check that all the drilled holes in the board are larder than our minimum drill size. We check that all the slots or non-circular holes in the board are larger than our minimum end mill size.

Minimum trace widths

We check that all the features in the copper and silkscreen layers are larger than our minimum widths. If there are features in a copper layer smaller than the minimum width this check will produce an error. If there are features smaller than the minimum width in a silkscreen layer they will be removed from the board.

Minimum trace spacing

We check that all the copper traces are spaced from each other by at least our minimum widths. If there is spacing between traces in a copper layer smaller than the minimum spacing this check will produce an error.

Minimum inner radius

We check that all the inner corner radii on the outer perimeter of the board are large enough for our routing end mill. We will attempt to add a radius to an inner corner if necessary. If we are unable to add a radius an error will be produced.

Layer trimming

We trim board layers based on our manufacturing capabilities. This process will remove features that extend beyond the outer dimensions of the board. For The silkscreen layers, silkscreen is also removed from areas without soldermask.

Continue to the next section to finish getting your board made with FlashPCB.