Introduction: PCB Hole Size Chart

About: I enjoy hiking and plant foraging... but most of time I do chores!
If you're into electronics, you might give PCB layout software a chance. This is what I'm doing because I'm finding that larger projects just take too long to solder by hand with perf-board and wire. This chart is generic so it will work with whichever layout software you chose since the end-file is just an image. The most important thing is to print out the chart without scaling at 600 DPI.

The chart can be found in the zip-file associated with this instructable. The layout software used is DipTrace.

  1. Print out the chart without scaling. If you have issues with this in your photo editing programs, try using GIMP.
  2. Measure the hole separation to confirm that it's 1/2 of an inch. If so, it was printed without scaling which is good.
  3. Place a component lead over a hole, this will give you a rough idea of what to use in your PCB design.
Thats it!

If you want to share your own PCBs for printing, I recommend exporting them as PNGs. To set the resolution for printing, I used ImageMagick's mogrify command as such:

mogrify.exe -units PixelsPerInch -density 600x600 "Hole Chart.png"

600 DPI is used because this is typically what most laser printers support for toner transfer method and printing.