By Ryan Stuart
2 min read Favorited by: 0 user Printed circuit boards (PCBs) are common electronic components that play an integral role in the development and functionality of many pieces of technological hardware. As such, many tech inventors wind up working with PCBs of various types and sizes within the course of their professional projects. If you’ve ever even seen a video of someone working with a PCB in real life, you know that there can be some fairly complicated steps involved, including soldering and delicate handling procedures. Working in a virtualized manner inside of a PCB design software allows for an entirely new way of approaching circuit board design and testing.
Playing an Involved Role in the Manufacturing Process
Most tech inventors are imaginative entrepreneurs who come up with the concept and then outsource the manufacturing processes. PCB design software lets you work on your hardware in the same way manufacturers would but in a simulated virtual environment. With these tools, anyone with a computer and the willingness to learn can use a PCB board view software to design complex pieces of hardware without ever touching an actual circuit board. The plans created in the software can be exported and sent to manufacturers for production according to the saved specifications.
Preventing the Need for Trial & Error
In the past, designing circuit boards would often involve tinkering with circuit boards repeatedly until you found a configuration that worked. Now, you can do the same thing inside of a software interface without wasting any materials and in a much more time-efficient way. While sometimes useful in entrepreneurship, trial and error is not only bad for your budget and schedule, it’s also bad for your health because you wind up working around so many factory-made components unnecessarily. Instead of shuffling circuit boards around, modern product designers use a board view software.
Determining Manufacturing Costs
Some PCB design software will not only help you figure out an ideal configuration for your PCBs, it will also help you establish the total project cost by factoring in the average price of each individual component. You can adjust these prices manually or use automated tools to import the prices from different online catalogs. By streamlining the material cost process, a well-rounded PCB design software makes it easy to determine and reliably calculate manufacturing costs within the scope of creating a single prototype or scaling up into full-fledged mass production.
Gamifying the Process
In a way, PCB design software makes the process of designing circuit boards a lot like a video game, as you can rotate the board and manipulate just as you would in a virtual game of chess. Except, instead of moving chess pieces around, you’re setting up advanced electrical configurations on a board. Of course, it’s not exactly a user-friendly game that anyone can play, so it’s a slightly changing game. Still, with all of the tutorials there are online to guide you through designing your first board, you should have no problem learning how to become an intermediate PCB design software user within a few weeks.
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Ryan Stuart
Ryan Stuart is a seasoned freelance features writer, editor, and professional photographer with a passion for exploring the world and capturing its beauty through words and images.
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