[ making cartridge pcbs]

• You could buy a ready-made flash-programmable cartridge, but it is more fun to make them yourself, and ultimately cheaper if you are making many projects
• Everything I needed to know, I learned in this Elector Electronics article
• I then proceeded to design a pcb using eagle. conveniently, there are part libraries that contain the standard cartridge size, pad layout, etc...I just can't seem to remember where I found it
• My minimal cartridge design ( eagle .brd format)
• Requirements: gold-plated fingers on the contacts, two-layers, 0.031" thick PCB (very important!); soldermask is nice
• This design is super-minimal (just the eeprom), which limits you to 256kbits of memory. consider that a programming challenge, not a limitation.
• This vignette might be called: "How I stopped worrying and learned to love offshore manufacture". At first, I sought out US-based companies to manufacture the boards. I figured I only really needed about five, so I sent out some quotes. Of course the above features add up to make the price not quite what you see in the back of Circuit Cellar magazine, and you need to get quotes. I was willing to pay a bit of a premium to buy from a US company, but the prices I was getting were on the order of $300, which was a bit too much for a little hobby project like this! Out of curiosity, I contacted Gold Phoenix in China (via Canada; see: borderless selling ). Amazing! Not only would the do the project for $160, but they would also send me 30 boards. Note that the price included overnight shipping from China, so the turnaround time was the same as if I had bought it from a nearby California company. So my rant is this: if American companies cannot get within an order of magnitude (half the price, 6 times as many boards = 12 times better) of their foreign competitors on price (and/or quality, and these are really quite nice boards), then even sympathetic consumers like myself will buy foreign products.
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• (Clockwise from top-left): empty pcb; pcb with dip-socket soldered (make the little "circle" on the socket point left); "finished" cartridge (cut out for clearance room; unscrewing the back screw on with a pair of pliers; pcb with soldered-on-eeprom (make sure the "notch" faces left
• When adding sockets or chips, put the component in place, trim the protruding leads flush with the reverse side (important), then solder. if you don't trim the leads, you'll have some mechanical issues