Ten years of PCBs

The beginning of 2023 marked ten years of me making printed circuit boards. From Eagle to Altium, through hole to QFN, one layer FR4 with no soldermask to 8 layers with exotic cores, it's been a fun ride! I hope to keep making cool stuff in the years to come.

Here are some blanks of my favorite PCB's that I've made and kept over the years.

I made my first PCB in 2012 when I was still in grad school. The PCB was designed to be a clone of an RFID card. Shortly after that I made a small adapter PCB to use a BusPirate to program the cards. You can see these in the bottom left of the picture.

My first “real design” (as I felt, at least) was the DoorProgrammer. The project was to allow access control for one of the old WREK studios. It was my first project where I designed the PCB, assembled the board, wrote and programmed the firmware, and wrote the software to communicate with it.