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Dreaming of bringing a new hardware product to market?  Perhaps you think your product will make the world a better place, or maybe you just dream of making millions of dollars.

Developing a prototype based on an Arduino (Genuino outside the USA), or other development kit, is a great first step.  But there is still much work to do if you want to make your product into something that can be manufactured in volume and sold to the masses.

So I’m going to break down the process for you into a few manageable steps:

I am not a fan of relying on the Autorouter in EAGLE — or any PCB CAD software for that matter. When laying out a board, I’ll use the autorouter to get an idea if the part placement is going to work or not. In this case, I was reminded how much autorouters suck! Even after running for while, the autorouter could only route up 50% of the nets (signals). Never Trust The Autorouter As Chris…

When you start creating your own parts in EAGLE, you’re going to want to store them somewhere.  Here’s how to setup EAGLE to use custom directories and how to create your own Library, which gets stored in the custom directory.  There are a number of steps involved, but once setup custom libraries give you a place to store components you create as well as the ability to copy other parts into your library.

The next stage of the reflow oven project is moving to a custom PCB for the controller electronics.  Overall the board is based on the ATmega32u4 with a DS3231 RTC.  The LCD module is intended to be driven by one of Adafruit’s Serial backpacks.  There is an area of LED indicators (something I learned from a previous project) and some extra VCC/GND pins sprinkled about.

The following resources compliment my EAGLE Introduction Classes and eBook.  Files mentioned in those resources will be provided here, although, the original creators may have newer versions available.

EAGLE Tutorials

These are EAGLE tutorials I have created.  There is a mix of written and video content.