David Taylor, DesignSpark PCB Review

Hopefully, by now you’ve all heard of our rapid electronics prototyping tool, DesignSpark PCB!

We recently released the sixth update to this powerful software, adding in new functionality and making significant improvements across the board.  If you are yet to try our powerful free design tool, David Taylor an amateur inventor and rookie PCB designer has written a great in-depth account of starting out with the software. 

We decided to post it here in the hope that you get the insight into what it’s like to start using DesignSpark PCB (and DesignSpark Mechanical too) and encourage you to get involved and have a go yourselves.  

By David Taylor

I am a great fan of DesignSpark PCB, and I’d like to tell you about how I came to use it. It’s not a short story; choosing an ECAD package involves a lot of difficult tradeoffs. But I think if I walk you through the process I went through, it might help you speed up your own choice.

I’m an amateur inventor with a strong background in software and occasional forays into hardware. My current project is to create a new kind of musical keyboard that arranges notes in a more natural pattern than a traditional piano keyboard, allowing a player to create rich chords with up to seven notes spanning two octaves or more... using just the four fingers of one hand. After building a couple of small prototypes and trying to manage the nasty tangle of wires under the keyboard, it became clear that my next step would be building a custom PC board. I wasn’t eager to do this because I’ve never designed a printed circuit board before and found the prospect intimidating. But it was clearly time to take the plunge.

Choices, choices…

The first step – and in some ways the most frustrating one –was choosing an ECAD package. There were many to choose from, they all offered a different mix of features and their prices ranged from free to several thousand dollars. Being new to ECAD, I didn’t know exactly what features I would need, so I wanted to choose a full-featured product. I also knew that I didn’t want to spend more than a couple hundred dollars given that this might be a one-off usage, so the high-end packages were out of the running. But I didn’t want to adopt a product that might be abandoned in the future, leaving my design stuck in proprietary file formats, so I was a little wary of the free packages.

As I began my comparison shopping, I quickly learned of two other constraints I wanted to avoid. Many of the free packages were crippled versions of expensive products I was very unlikely to buy, and others locked me into using a specific production house for fabricating the board. Since I didn’t want to be either crippled or captive, I decided to avoid products with these restrictions.

After spending way more time on the search than I wanted to, I decided to try DesignSpark PCB first. The descriptions were pretty compelling and the reviews were quite favorable.

Too good to be true?

My first experience with DesignSpark was quite positive: The interface was pretty intuitive, even for a total newbie to the process -- which is saying a lot for any CAD program. Also, the support for importing standard libraries of components was excellent, and the overall flow of work to get from an idea to a board design immediately made sense to me. I especially liked the 3D viewer. Somehow, the ability to see the finished board in 3D and view it from all angles gave me more confidence that I could actually design a PCB and make it work.

Then I got cold feet. The one negative that came up in the reviews and discussion forums was a general suspicion of the motives of DesignSpark for giving away such a full-featured product. It wasn’t a crippled version of a “real” ECAD package, and it didn’t hold you captive to a single board house. So why were they giving it away for free? Would they get lots of people using it and then start charging big bucks for it? It just felt like there had to be a catch in there somewhere.

Returning to the first choice

With this in mind I went looking for more information about DesignSpark, eventually finding a detailed user review. This deeper review confirmed my earlier impressions: It was a full-featured product that wasn’t crippled in any way; it supported all the standard output files so there was no problem with vendor capture; it included extensive libraries of standard components, including their 3D form factors and the 3D viewer gave me excellent insights into how the finished board would look. I also picked up on another feature: DS PCB would automatically produce a bill of materials for all the parts required to build the board, including price quotes, which would really help me make the difficult tradeoffs between cost and function in generating a production-ready design. There was even a “Buy Now” button that would automatically place an order for exactly the mix of components required by the design.

Now “all” I had to do was learn how to use an ECAD program and design an actual board. This is a daunting prospect to an ECAD newbie like me, but I soon discovered that, compared to other ECAD systems I’d looked at or tried out, DS PCB has a much shallower learning curve. My experience of using it was that rather than having to study the process in a manual and then figure out what to do next at every step, DS just led me naturally through the process. Better still, it kept simple things simple and it kept the complex things out of sight when I didn’t need them. I also found the instructional materials to be very well written (a rarity, as you no doubt know), I received immediate support from DesignSpark when I needed it, and I got lots of help from their on-line forums. My guess is that for the current state of ECAD, that was about as easy an introduction as I was likely to find. It might help if I add here that I am a cognitive psychologist who has done a fair amount of user interface design over the years, and I have also managed documentation and training groups. So you can consider my assessment of these particular qualities to be a professional appraisal as well as personal one.

After several weeks of learning and doing trial designs, I created a design that I thought should work. Then I stalled for another couple of weeks because it felt like the process had been too easy and I didn’t quite believe I had created a design that would work. But I wasn’t able to find any flaws, so I finally sent the files off to a production house and waited for the boards. When I got them, I was delighted to find that my first PCB design worked perfectly the first time out. Okay, it wasn’t a very complicated board, and there are a few things I’d do differently the next time around, but for a first attempt it came out pretty nice and it works perfectly. I don’t know if I could have gotten the same happy result with one of the other products I looked at, but my feeling is that DS played a strong role in my getting that design right the first time.

More tools from DesignSpark

Now that I have the electronics up and running, I am designing the housing. It’s a fairly complex shape because it has to enclose several PC boards, various knobs and buttons, and a few other internal components. And I want a very specific form factor, so I can’t just buy an existing enclosure. For the prototypes, I am hand-fabricating a temporary housing out of aluminum and wood. But once I have a shape that I’m happy with, I plan to turn to DesignSpark’s latest offering: DesignSpark Mechanical. This program will take my existing board designs, including the dimensions of the mounted components, and let me “draw” a smoothly shaped cabinet around them that precisely fits. The output of this program can be sent out for injection molding, allowing me to have a simple, two piece enclosure that has all the curves and crannies I desire. Assuming my prototypes work well and there is interest in my invention, moving to DS Mechanical will be my next step.

So, based on my experience as an ECAD newbie, I highly recommend that you give DesignSpark PCB a try. The company has asked me for feedback on the product and ideas for improvements, and I have offered a few small suggestions, but the product is really solid just the way it is.

I really hope this story helps some of you to streamline your own choice of an ECAD product.