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The PCB or printed circuit board is easier to make than you think, even professionally looking ones, on this short tutorial i will explain how to create very nice pcbs starting from a schematic. Each step will be described in details and I also made lots of pictures to document the process and make it easier to understand.

Tools you will use (this is what i used)

• soldering gun or iron
• a laser printer
• old magazine
• some tape
• needles (around 10)
• permanent marker
• multimeter (or something to check for short circuits)
• a cutter
• drilling machine (or a motor) and 1mm drill, if you don't have a drilling machine find a way to attach the drill to the motor axis and drill some 1mm holes.

In this tutorial I used the schematics and the pcb design of the ROAR MPP brain module, but all the other images are from the ROAR HB power module, i hope that this is not confusing for you.  Unfortunate when i created the power module (the h bridge) i created the board directly without creating a schematic first... my mistake, so now I only have the board for that no schematic, the schematic is only on paper.

The steps you will need to complete until the competition of the pcb are.

1.  Install eagle if  you don't already have it.

2. Create you schematics using the circuit design mode in eagle, after that is completed you should have something like this :

3. still using eagle convert this schematic to board, the easiest way to do this is to click the "board" button, that is the 5th button in the top, next to print and cam buttons. Eagle will just put your components there, but now you can drag them around to place them however you want them on the board, I ended with something like this :

After you have the board and the pcb design (routed) you have to print separately the 2 faces of the design. You can do this very easy, using the layers option of eagle, so you should export both sides and print them, you should have something like this :

WARNING : those images are just representative do not use them in any board, if you want the board for the ROAR HB power module go to the specific post.

4. Print those images on a pice of magazine, it has to be thin glossy paper, you can also process the images first in some program to make them black, so the maximum of toner will be used, also if your printer has some tonner saving settings disable them, before printing remember to mirror the back image. After you print them, cut the excess of paper aout leaving a margin of about 5mm.

5. Now cut a pice of the board to match the biggest of the 2 prints, also leave a margin of about 2 mm on each side, we leave all those margins to make sure that both of the prints will fit on the board after we align the holes.

6. After you cut the board to the required size, clean it very well first with acetone and alcohol and then i used some special material used to cleat cooper pipes, this works perfectly and makes the board very clean and shiny, this is important because the toner will stick much better to the board.

7. Now secure on of the prints (the one with the most lines on it) on the board using some tape

8. Now with the iron on the highest setting press the paper on the board for a few seconds (around 30), just press it do not move it, after this interval you can move the iron on all directions to make sure that all the surface is covered very well and the paper is sticking to the board, pres and iron it until you see that the paper is starting to get a yellow, brown color, this means that is starting to get burned.

9. Put the board in war water, be very care full the board is extremely hot you can get burned very very easy because cooper is a very good head conducting material.

10. Let it soak for about 30 minutes, or as much is necessary to get all the paper soaked, you can also boil the water if you want to hurry up the process. After that try to see how easy the paper is coming of, you can remove the pices that are coming off easy

11. Repeat the process, soak->remove paper, until all the paper is off

12. Now using something with a sharp end, remove all excess paper, make sure that there is no paper left where is no toner, make sure that there are no connections made between routes, because if you leave any will be harder to correct after this.

13. Cover the other end of the board with some plastic tape (insulating tape used in electric installations is perfect, leave about 2-3 mm excess of tape on each side

14. Enter the board in corrosive solution

15. You can agitate the solution once in a while, and check regularly if the excess cooper has gone away.

16 . Get the board out and clean it really well with water, lots of water, because the solution is highly corrosive and can damage your pipes, after that remove the tape from the back.

17. Now, you have to check again to see if there are any mistakes from the original print, check if there is any cooper left where should not be, and clean it wit something, this may be harder but needs to be done :

18. We drill some holes on the board, this holes will be used to insert the components, but at this point we need them to align the 2 faces of the board. To make drilling easier we mark the point with something with a rounded tip, just give it 2 hits with a light hammer.

19. We align the second face based on the holes :

20. repeat steps 8 to 17 for the second face, and be care full not to miss one because you board can be compromised.

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