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jhedwardsyesterday at 3:29 PM3 repliesview on HN

Ah this reminds me of my first big mistake with PCBs. I have recently started down the hardware track, and my first PCB has a number of BC547 and BC558 transistors on it.

Once I had a functioning prototype, the next step was to convert it into a schematic. After that, you have to convert the schematic into a PCB. Now we are at two layers of translation, and at this step I made a mistake: I wanted to use SMD components to save money, and I found that the BC8xx transistors are the SMD equivalent of the BC5xx ones, so I used the footprint of the BC8xx transistors in my PCB, with no errors from KiCad.

As it turns out, the BC8xx footprint is not compatible with a BC5xx schematic! The pinout is different: the base is pin 1 instead of pin 2, so the components in my PCB that use transistors (crucially, the voltage controlled amplifier) didn't work. Unlike a bug, that mistake cost me $200 and weeks of development time, but after 10+ years of writing software I'm still happy to be making things that people can touch.


Replies

dgxyzyesterday at 4:27 PM

We've all done that sort of stuff!

Mine was assuming that the stripe on tantalum SMD capacitors was the negative side. First prototype board came back from the fab and pick and place department (we had it in house). Immediately caught fire when I powered it up :)

Second lesson, start with current limit on your bench supply, not throw 10A into it :)

estimator7292yesterday at 5:29 PM

I've been an EE for a decade and I made this exact mistake last week. It's inevitable lol

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