Isolation Routing PCBs

[cropwell]

Nice work. Personally I don't remove the unneeded copper and prefer to create earth plane. It means less milling work. I also use a miniature table saw for cutting the PCB to reduce the CNC work even more. Previously I used Eagle but then my son didn't like Eagle because it is far too complicated to use if you are a newbie, so he found EasyEDA when he wanted to make some PCB artwork, and after having tried it out about a year or two ago I got stuck to that one. It's web based, so I can access it anywhere I am, very fast, fairly easy to use and to create your own parts, as well as to generate tracks with the locally installed auto router. It has all the necessary functions and it creates g-code as well.

I don't always remove the copper earth plane, it depends on the proximity to the tracks and where I have to solder. I use Circuit Wizard, which is now not supported and is an old and creaky product and does not support surface mount components anyway. I find the circuit simulation good for a quick indication that I have got it right, although it doesn't handle floating logic inputs very well. It does allow me to juggle the component placing before routing the nets. The Gerber and drilling files it produces go into CopperCAM, again an unsupported program I have had yonks. This defines the tracks and can produce Gcode directly with earth plane copper removal if desired, but I prefer to output a dxf and control gcode production with EstlCAM. I can also introduce custom board outlines at this stage.

It is not the latest whizzy whizzy method, but it works for me and it is software I am familiar with.