Does anyone know of a company that will take a drawing of a circuit board and turn that into a real circuit board? None of the PCB companies I have contacted will do that. They all want "Gerber Files" to make the board and I can't make those myself (yes, I have downloaded board design software, but can't make any of them work). So I need to pay a company to convert my drawing into a board.
There are some but its an expensive service, if its not too complicated i can give it a go for you and send you the gerbers you need.
Thanks for the offer. It has 80 parts, so not a quick project. I will send you a copy and see want you think. I would reimburse you for your time/effort of course.
Suggest you post schematic and the (handmade) artwork you have so far so we know what are we talking about.
How many will you make afterwards?
If many, forcing you to go through a PCB fabricator, it will force you to *fully* redraw your PCB from scratch, using original design only as a "guide" but not much else, there´s no graphic-to-gerber conversion possible because source misses tons of data.
Now if you only need one or two, you can turn a *drawing* into usable PCB tracks artwork, which is also a drawing, to toner transfer and etch a couple boards at home.
How many will you make afterwards?
If many, forcing you to go through a PCB fabricator, it will force you to *fully* redraw your PCB from scratch, using original design only as a "guide" but not much else, there´s no graphic-to-gerber conversion possible because source misses tons of data.
Now if you only need one or two, you can turn a *drawing* into usable PCB tracks artwork, which is also a drawing, to toner transfer and etch a couple boards at home.
Going through a schematic drawing stage is an important sanity check that you have got the drawing correct. It is much easier to check a circuit diagram than a PCB artwork and the software will ensure that the artwork follows the circuit diagram without further connection errors
I think the OP *already* has PCB artwork , maybe from a magazine or even the Net, but large fabrication houses do not work with plain graphics.
Mark suggests an interesting workaround, that software turns an image into 3 files: 2 Gerbers : solder side (single layer) , presumably silkscreen or "labels" side, and drill master, complete not only with hole x-y coordinates but with estimated drill size, which I find almost miraculous.
Sprint Layout is relative affordable PCB design software which also allows adding an image as a background and then tracing over it manually. More control over hole sizes and trace width etc, but a bit more work too. It does produce Gerber files that I've used to order PCB from several places.
Probably easiest way if no schematic is to copy a blank pcb into PCB entry software.
Copy it exactly so you can spot mistakes easier.
Copy it exactly so you can spot mistakes easier.
I have reverse engineered an old design into KiCad by importing the image into a technical layer. I had a schematic for a different version of the old board and copied that to KiCad and built a new PCB, using the image as a template. This highlighted where the old schematic and PCB did not match, giving me a chance to try to figure out some lost change history
I'm not sure if this is what you are looking for but I have used EasyEDA a bunch of times. Import your circuit design, it transforms it to a layout that you tweak as needed and then they have a partnership with a board printer that has a minimum order of like 5 boards. It's super cheap. Turn around time now is a little slow because of Covid, but in the past I have gotten fully done boards in like a week.
EasyEDA - Online PCB design & circuit simulator
EasyEDA - Online PCB design & circuit simulator