Olimex advice for Eagle users

Here follows some advice based on my experience of using Olimex for PCB prototypes.

~~Olimex are the cheapest and most helpful board house I've found, and I highly recommend them.~~

Update: 18th June 2009

I don't think I can recommend olimex any longer. I used them between 2005 and early 2009, and over that time they've got less and less reliable. It is now very difficult to place orders with emails seemingly often getting lost, and the orders seem to be getting slower / taking longer and longer to be handled. The PCBs are unfortunately also not the best; incidences of tracks lifting and through hole plating coming out during rework are significantly higher with the boards I've had from Olimex than those from other manufacturers.

I'm currently using European Circuits. So far, their service and responsiveness is far above that of olimex, the boards are higher quality and the prices seem comparable.

General advice

If making a small board, try if possible to make it panelize onto an SS panel rather than an SQ, as it is cheaper to order 4 SS panels than 1 SSQ. (You get a 20% 'repeat order' discount for 3 of the SS panels, even if they are all ordered together.)

Make sure you have the 'Always vector font' option in the 'user interface' settings switched on.

Olimex have some advice for avoiding their 'silk screen' fix charge.

They also have instructions for generating gerber and so on.

Generally I:

Save board/schematic with a -ss prefix
Run OlimexAllSilk.ulp
Run drillcfg.ulp
Goto CAM processor
Run excellon-rack.cam, giving it the rack just generated by drillcfg.
Run gerb274x.cam
Use pentalogix viewmate to view the generated files

Advice for single sided boards

When doing single side boards, the eagle libraries use lots of 0.8mm drills - this isn't a standard drill for olimex so they will charge you $1.30. Just pay this; it's usually not worth the hassle to avoid it.

If you really insist on avoid this charge, you have two choices:

Use restring to increase the pad sizes, then use a drill rack without a 0.8mm drill, and make sure the tolerances cause the 0.8mm holes to be increased to 0.9mm.
Follow the instructions below for changing drill sizes for double sided boards, and change the 0.8mm drills to 0.9mm ones.

Advice for double side boards

For double sided boards, Eagle will give you the required hole side in the final board, but olimex require the hole size before plating.

It is a bit fiddly to do this, see our HOWTO for adjusting drill sizes.

Joseph Heenan, joseph@heenan.me.uk