Turning Arduino project into PCB

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Mortal517
 
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Joined: Mon May 15, 2017 1:34 pm

Turning Arduino project into PCB

Post by Mortal517 »

My name is Geng, and I started a project on a 2 axis GPS solar tracker that solely base on GPS information instead of relying on a light sensor of any kind.
Picture of the system
Picture of the system
a.jpg (310.34 KiB) Viewed 1632 times
In the picture, it's a Elegoo mega and an adafruit GPS shield (and another protoshield for my convenience). It's connected to a external GPS antenna and an adafruit anemometer. The limit switch is for breaking the motor (indicated by the LED lights), which will have 4 relays connected once finished too. There are two buttons for reset control and two encoder for motors. I used all 6 interrupt pins on it.

My question is what is a good resource to use to turn this into PCB. I have 0 experience in PCB design, and I fear that I may mess up the arduino (elegoo) part because I have no clue of what all the chips are for. Would it be a good idea to just look for a schematic design of the arduino and copy it + the circuit I have? Or just leave the arduino and print a small circuit board as a custom shield?
Or is there a company (group) who would provide such service?

Thanks. This is my first time using this forum. Please let me know if I did it right.

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adafruit_support_bill
 
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Re: Turning Arduino project into PCB

Post by adafruit_support_bill »

Not sure about the Elegoo boards, but the official Arduino boards all have schematics published on the Arduino.cc site.
But if this is your first PCB project, you might want to start with a stock processor board and design a custom shield. The PCB files for our proto-shield might be a good place to start: https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-Proto-Shield-PCB

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