Beginner Questions

[Perry Sugerman]

I recently sent my first circuit board off to OSH Park and the prototypes came back. I made several mistakes that I think any regular user of Eagle software would not make.
1. First, the titling is nearly invisible. Just font color changes?
2. Second, the mounting holes appear as dimples in the top layer. Any idea how to get them to be through holes?
3. Finally, the mounting holes for resisters are much too close together. I can fix that by measuring the the resistors. The library provides 0.1 inch centers.
Thanks in advance for any advice in addressing 1 and 2.

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[David Murphy]

Can you upload a photo so we can see what you mean. And maybe the Eagle files too.

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[BB-AI/Sphere (Clem)]

For #2, take a look at https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/137394/mounting-hole-on-a-pcb . I am assuming you want them to be a GND.

To get the same holes in your eagle project go to your schematic and click on add (or type add in the text box and hit enter). Now to go the holes library, then you see there is a MOUNT-PAD-ROUND and a MOUNT-PAD-SQUARE library. These are the library's you are looking for. In the schematic you can connect the pad to a signal, which is mostly used to connect to ground (not sure about this). And yes on the blue PCB's they are also functioning as via's probably because the screws are connected to ground.
The holes in your mounting hole is probably there so more current can flow through. To get these holes also in your eagle project you probably need to make your own library for that. The golden finish on the mounting hole is there because it is considered as a via or regular hole.

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[BB-AI/Sphere (Clem)]

If you would like to learn more, read https://www.lucidar.me/en/eagle/adding-mounting-holes-to-a-PCB/ ...

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[Perry Sugerman]

Here is a picture of the board. Bottom surface of Dual Control Switch Driver. The holes in the very corners are intended to be insulated mounting holes. Instead they are gold dots.
[DCDS.jpg]

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[Rob Pearce]

Post by Perry Sugerman
Here is a picture of the board. Bottom surface of Dual Control Switch Driver. The holes in the very corners are intended to be insulated mounting holes. Instead they are gold dots.

What did you use to define those "mounting holes"? They're definitely
too small to be useful ;) What you want is a hole, using the HOLE tool,
of about 3mm diameter (or 0.12" or 120mil) or more. The board house may
plate it through unless you instruct them not to, but since Eagle will
treat a hole as something to avoid, there won't be any copper connecting
to it. I'm guessing you didn't have a good feel for the scale of things
when you placed them, as they're a bit too close to the corners for
proper mounting holes.

On your first issue, about "the titling", are you referring to the text
"Dual Control Switch Driver" and "PerryAire"? If so, you've drawn them
in copper, on layer 1. There's nothing wrong with that but it will lead
to relatively low contrast, especially if you allow the ground plane to
flood around in into them. You can avoid the latter by placing a
keep-out rectangle around the text, or a "cut-out" polygon. However,
you're probably better off simply moving them to the tNames or tPlace
layer to get them silk screen printed in white.

On your third issue, the resistors all seem to be in the "0204/2V"
package, which is the first one in the list for R-EU_ and R-US_ in the
standard libraries. It's intended for a small resistor mounted
vertically. You probably wanted the "0207/12" or similar, for horizontal
mounting.