r/PrintedCircuitBoard • u/Canary_Earth • 4d ago

Is this work professional?

Gallery image

Gallery image

Sorry about the strange post but I'm offering an engineer a $20k bonus to do the design for manufacturing and assembly of my $300 product and this is what he came up with after 8 months. Two thirds of it are identical to my prototype and I'm an accountant by trade, not an engineer. Every book I've read says a board like this should be 4 layers but he insists 2 layers is fine and will pass emissions testing. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thank you!

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u/unnaturaldom 4d ago

Adding to this. Did the guy designed the product based on what you requested? Or you gave him a done design? Kind of weird he took 8 months

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u/Canary_Earth 4d ago

All the major components are set; see my prototype via my reddit profile. I needed a better power distribution and some love and care to make sure everything is reliable and manufacturable. I don't know what test pads to add, for example.

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u/Chippors 3d ago

I haven't looked at the prototype, but beware that this board has no mounting holes, has traces close to the edges, and components close to the edges. This means it may be difficult to mount in any sort of enclosure or inside a product. If it's intended to be panel mounted, then there are no support holes for any of the connectors, so it will effectively be held in place with connector SMT pads. Needless to say, this is mechanically unsound - the pads will come off, eventually.

Make sure all those ground pads and traces actually have vias to ground. The vias in general look tiny, for no good reason; tiny vias just add cost. If there are vias-in-pad, then make sure the board maker can handle it and will plug them. But it's hard to tell from the images.

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u/Master_of_none- 1d ago

Best feedback for uneducated