It has been too long since I have worked on PCB design, meaning that I need to re-learn how software dose things. To be honest I am having some issues with the software. Things that should be simple like combining tracks and holes into components are a real pain. In fact I have not managed to work out how to do that yet. If this was a microsoft product you would select the items and say group. But that does not work. Love them or hate them, microsoft has spent a lot of time on usability analysis. There is a lot to be said for a consistent user interface.

The other trouble is working out what components to use. Spacing between pins can be an issue – particularly when attempting to work out what a part is. I think I have worked out that one part has 1.25mm between the pins. The other option is 1.27mm. 0.02mm does not seem like much does it? Well, when there are ten or eleven pins in a row this does add up. But 0.2mm does not sound like much either, until you realise that the hole for the pin is only 0.6mm, meaning that it would not fit into the hole.

These are the reasons I do not do this work very often. The other is that there are two standards for pin sizes. The first is imperial, and the second is metric. Half the parts are metric, and the other hald are in imperial. Things are becoming metric, but you are always needing to move between metric and imperial grids. This becomes a real pain!

Anyway I have work to do… But before I go comes news that a girl in the USA has worked out how to fold a piece of paper 12 times…. Most people believed that it was impossible for you to do it more than 8 times…