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On Paper (December 7, 2007)
Somehow I don't think this is what people meant by 'Does it make sense on paper'.
Jokes aside, prototyping on paper makes sense when you need to ensure physical fit before sending the board to manufacturing. Since we can't etch boards on-site, this is the next best thing. Actually fitting the components is the often missing step that follows "print off a 1-to-1".
This board (built against a padded mailer) is obviously not assembled with the correct parts, diodes are filling in for resistors, and a house-brand NPN is wearing the 7805 costume. These are just examples of the correct package size.
But, if you populate the correct components, you're not too picky, and you're handy with a soldering iron, it's possible to dead-bug solder the leads to each other. We've done that with business card stock when we need to actually test how a board will work before we manufacture it.
OnPaper (2) PCB (6)
Posted by spiffed at December 7, 2007 3:04 AM