Let's be frank: We've made a lot of mistakes over the years. In the ongoing pursuit of better-designed PCBs, we've dealt with tons of screw-ups, from boards with ill-arranged traces to boards with...no traces at all, actually, and a host of others. Fortunately, by now we feel like we've gotten a pretty solid handle on a largely-error-free design for manufacturing process, and we want to help you avoid some of our past mistakes.
We primarily use EAGLE to design our boards, and we've amassed a catalog of over 500 open source design files, as well as guides, tutorials, tips and tricks to help you through every step of the PCB design process. Check out our video below for an intro to the resources available, and visit our special EAGLE page for all the good stuff. Happy building!
Losing the ground plane ... I'm guilty of that too.
Same here, sort of... I had made a change (40-pin DIP to 44pin PLCC) on a board that had 3 separate plane pairs (digital power & gnd, analog power & gnd, and patient isolation power & gnd). When we got the boards back and populated the first 10 with components. The test & calibrate department found that two of the 3 planes didn't have any thermal relieves to plated holes and vias... ooops... I think the patient isolation pair were one of the two unconnected, so they were really isolated. ;-)
I never did live that one down at that company. Luckily for me an engineer had signed off on the photo-plots so there were plenty to help share blame. Check-out procedures were enhanced after that...