Circuit boards come in all shapes, sizes and colors. There are many reasons why you might want to swap the standard green boards for something more exciting. It might be to simply make your projects stand out more.

Dangerous prototypes are quickly identified by their bright red color, genuine Arduinos are always blue and the Lilypad is a lovely lilac.

There are also functional reasons. A white board could make the reflection from a mounted LED more color neutral, while a black board mounted in a translucent acrylic enclosure would be barely noticeable from the outside.

Thickness

Similar to the different colors, PCBs also come in varying thicknesses. A thinner board is lighter while a thicker board is more robust. Sometimes the necessary thickness is determined by other factors, but often you can choose from a range of options.

To help me select a nice color and appropriate thickness, I’ve made a set of PCB samples in seven different colors (white, yellow, blue, green, purple, red, black), six different thicknesses (0.6 mm, 0.8 mm, 1.0 mm, 1.2 mm, 1.6 mm, 2.0 mm) and two different surface finishes (HASL, ENIG).

The boards are approximately 22 mm x 22 mm (900 mil x 900 mil), this way you can fit four of them on a standard 5 cm x 5 cm prototype board and still have some room to cut them apart.

The front

The front side is the same for all boards. On the left hand side there are 6 vias ranging in diameter from 0.4 mm to 1.0 mm. In the center is a description of the thickness, color, surface finish and the contents of the reverse side. Part of this text is on the raw PCB substrate and part is on a copper pour. Next to it is the justgeek.de logo in exposed copper.

The bottom part consists of a simple example circuit. It is a basic Flip-Flop, made out of 2 transistors and 4 resistors.

The back

The back of the boards differs for each color. I took inspiration from the silkscreen reference board and tried to include some useful examples of common PCB design situations.

0.6 mm white

The white board has examples of silkscreen lines of different width.

0.8 mm yellow

The yellow board has examples of text in different sizes with a ratio of text height to line width of 8%.

1.0 mm blue

The blue board is similar to the yellow one, except that the text ratio is 15%.

1.2 mm green

The green board has examples of various silkscreen variations.

1.6 mm purple

This is the standard OSH Park configuration. The surface finish is ENIG (Electorless Nickel Imersion Gold) and the reverse has examples of different SMD pitches and BGA grids.

1.6 mm red

The red board shows examples of different SMD diode packages.

2.0 mm black

The black board has an ENIG finish as well. The reverse shows the most common SMD resistor and capacitor sizes. On the left is a standard footprint for the sizes, while on the right is an outline of the actual component size.

General thoughts

While I have used most board colors at some point or the other, I was surprised by the stark difference in “opacity”. On the black and white boards, there is almost no visual difference between copper filled areas and empty parts, tracing the connections in the example circuit is quite hard. The yellow board on the other hand has such a stark difference that I would probably use excessive copper pours just for aesthetic purposes.

Surplus boards

Since the minimum order was about 40 pieces of each color, I have a few sets left over, which I’ve put up in my tindie store.

Files

Gerber files for the 2 x 2 panels

white

yellow

blue

green

purple

red

black

Gerber files for the individual boards