Summary： My first introduction to PC board fabrication process
Yesterday I wrote about designing my first PC board with KICad and PCBWay, but it wasn’t my first experience. Back in 1979, at age 16 during a Michigan Tech summer program, I saw the traditional process of making a PC board using large stencils, photography, and UV exposure, though we didn't make one ourselves. Later, I attempted Radio Shack’s printed circuit kit at least two times without success.
In 2005, while finishing a Micro Computer associate degree and interning at Holt Instrument Laboratories, I was tasked with turning a breadboarded solenoid control circuit into a functional PC board.
A single-sided board was designed using an old 386 computer, with traces and footprints accidentally mirrored so the ICs had to be soldered directly to the trace side, and I eliminated one IC by combining logic gates.
For my own curiosity I created a Delphi 6 program to view the Gerber file for experimental purposes, which successfully generated an image of the board.
