PCB Layout

Currently, the PCB is being soldered up in a rather quick fashion.  All the components were purchased from Mouser. The components are listed by part number on the following websites (and since my board is mostly a hack of these two boards, it only makes sense to purchase these parts): XBee Adapter and Arduino.  After about a week, all the parts came in and soldering has commenced.

PCB Board with some components

What can be seen here are two IC Sockets (also called retention pads), the linear 3v regulator (top right corner) and several other solder joints.  These other solder joints are the layer changes.  Since this board was constructed with both top and bottom traces, tiny holes were generated at the trace termination and the trace was continued on the other side.  A short pin from a male-to-male header was removed and inserted into this hole, cut off close to the board and the soldered in place.  This effectively serves the same purpose as the joints created by a professional PCB house (who was going for aesthetics anyways?).  This was probably the most tedious part, as each pad generated by the machine was extremely small.

Since this board contains both top and bottom traces, each component will need to be soldered on both the top and the bottom.  Some components, such as the 3V linear regulator in the top right corner, prove no problem in this action. Other components, like the IC Sockets, are quite challenging.  At the time of design, I had no idea how difficult it would be to solder in the socket on the the top side where the socket was inserted, and therefore, the components were inserted rather closely.  This made it quite difficult to solder into place.  After melting quite a bit of plastic on the socket (thankfully it only serves as insulation), a simpler method was discovered! By cutting multi-stranded wire into short segments, it can be inserted into the hole, laid flat along on top of the wire and then soldered into place.  This extends the leads through the hole where it can be soldered directly to the bottom of the board with the component.  This proved extremely helpful when soldering the XBee headers into place as the leads on the header barely fit through the hole to the bottom of the board.