Interest in OSI 495 Prototype Boards?

[glitch]

I'm thinking about doing a photocopy clone of the OSI 495 prototype board. This should be really easy as the original was single-sided to begin with. Photocopying means I don't have to try and learn KiCad to escape the size restrictions on EAGLE Lite, and I should be able to produce some boards from the massive pile of FR4 copper clad I have access to. Is anyone interested in a few prototype boards? If I produce them myself, they'll probably be electroless tin plated and come with the holes un-drilled. You drill out the holes you need, as you need them, so I don't have to spend hours drilling basically perfboard on my manual drill press!

I can also make transparencies and 8x10" FR4 blanks available if anyone wants to do the home etch thing.

[glitch]

Decided to do one better, I'm having the board professionally scanned at 4000 DPI and turned into a set of CAD drawings, should be able to clean them up and have a board house run them at a reasonable price -- I'm aiming for less than $50/board.

[glitch]

Test run is off to the board manufacturer! We'll see if the scans + drill file matches up close enough. It's a 1:1 scan, so the resulting boards will still have the "tape and film" layout look to them. I did add a note in the copper layer that the board is a respin, so they don't end up on eBay as originals or something.

[dave]

Nice, very interested to see the result.

[glitch]

Me too! I'm using a new board shop due to the size of Ohio Scientific boards. Now that the Chinese new year is over, my Gerbers have been approved and the manufacturing process has started. Apparently it's 9 days from approval/payment to arrival at my door!

[dave]

I'd be interested in knowing which service you used for the scanning. I've got some more blank OSI boards I could do the same with. Do they provide drill files along with the gerbers?

Do they also do multi-layer boards? That requires shaving off one layer at a time, then scanning, then repeating. There aren't any OSI boards that do it, but it would be worth knowing a shop that does.

Thanks,

Dave

[glitch]

I'm using Mile High Test Service ( http://www.mhtest.com/ ) which was recently bought by Gardien Services. Grant Stockley uses them for his reproduction Altair boards. I know they at least do two-sided boards, and from the quote form it looks like they do multilayer/silkscreen/solder mask scanning if you require it. It's not cheap, but it's cheaper than laying out the board all over, assuming you could be billing your time for something else (I'm currently a contractor, so I rationalized paying $200 to have a protoboard scanned as still being less than what I'd spend in otherwise billable hours to do the same work).

They do provide an Excellon drill file with the Gerbers. On my scan, the board outline came in the same Gerber file as the copper layer, so I had to manually split it out to satisfy the manufacturer's requirements.

I've got some more complicated boards I'll likely have them scan for me -- this was sort of a "can't get more basic than this" test run, to see what was involved with turning a board into CAM files for production with only open-source tools. Let me know if you'd like to work together on getting your other boards reproduced, I'm hoping to be able to offer these OSI 495 boards at a low enough price to sell enough to recoup my initial layout.

[glitch]

They're in! Aside from one small, inconsequential imperfection in my Gerbers, they're good to go. Here's an Imgur album:

http://imgur.com/a/cUg8t

[glitch]

Listed one for sale on eBay:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/272155352950

Started at $0.99 -- we'll see where it goes! If there's a lot of interest in these, I'll do a larger run and determine a fixed price.

[lowrybt1]

Thanks for doing this! I'll be bidding on one. For the prototypically challenged, is there a good source for schematics or steps for using this board for creating a RAM board to replace the 527 or 520?

Tom