Anyone who has spent time up to their elbows in ferric chloride in the kitchen sink knows the importance of getting the design of a printed circuit board right before production.

Pineapple's PCB is an ingenious ROM package which makes the whole business of making your own printed circuit boards much more professional.

PCB will not help you to actually route the tracks on a circuit board design. There are software packages to do this but they are outside the realms of the humble Beeb. Instead, PCB is a highly specialised drawing package to bring professional PCB designs within any Beeb owner's reach.

The biggest problem of producing a PCB design is getting all the information in front of you at one time while still leaving it readable. A complex design can consist of arrangements of tracks on both sides of the board, the component layout and even the component markings for a silk screen printing if the board is a professional production model. All this makes pencil and paper a messy and unreliable solution.

PCB allows any or all of these separate parts of a design to be displayed and edited on the screen at the same time. The individual 'layers' of the PCB design can then be printed out as finished artwork for the production process.

The program has two screens, each very similar to the other. The first screen is used to create the board shape, component layout and labelling. The software can cope with any board shape of up to 8 in by 5.6 in. The board outline is displayed on a Mode 1 screen in yellow with 0.1 in graduations around the edge. This is the smallest spacing for components and tracks.

Along the base of the screen are the symbols to place on the board. There are three sizes of 'roundels' - the circles of copper with a hole in the centre for soldering in a component lead - resistors, integrated circuits and lines (the last three in one of two orientations). These can be selected either with a cross-hair cursor under the control of the cursor keys or with a function key which cycles through them.

Once a symbol is chosen it can be placed on the board at the cursor position by pressing Return. At this point the size of the component can be changed with Shift and the cursor keys. When the length of the integrated circuit symbols is changed more or less connection pins are provided as well as the actual dimensions altered.

Text can also be added. This can be in any of four directions and in two sizes - the 'normal' mode 1 size and a small size for component labelling. Once a component or other marking has been placed on the board it can be picked up again and moved, changed in size or deleted. In this way the component layout and labelling is built up on the screen.

The next stage is to route the tracks between all the connections. This is done on the second screen. The process of routing the tracks on one or both sides of the board is similar to placing the components. One of three track widths is chosen from the menu at the base of the screen and a track is painted between roundels. The program automatically connects the tracks to a roundel if, and only if, the cursor is placed exactly over the connection point. In this way the tracks can be routed just where they are needed.

Again, text can be added in four directions, to appear on the final board as copper lettering. Tracks (or letters) can be deleted by filling them in with black. Alternatively a large area of the board, hounded by tracks, can be filled in to appear as an area of copper on the final board.

There are two colours of tracks that can be placed on the board - red and blue. These correspond to the two sides of a double sided circuit board. With PCB both sides of the board can be seen at the same time but are still easily recognised a separate, though use on a monochrome screen might make the red 'side' difficult to see.

Once the board has been fully drawn out, it can be stored on disc or printed out. The printout can be either the same size as the finished board or twice as large. PCB requires an Epson-compatible printer with the quadruple density graphics mode. This produces a very dense printout with a greater resolution than the board displayed on the screen. The roundels appear rounded on the printout, but decidedly pixelated on the screen. Tracks routed between two adjacent integrated circuit connection roundels appear to touch the roundels on the screen but on paper a special stretch of thin track is automatically printed. The printout can then be used directly to produce very adequate PCBs using one of the proprietary methods for this.

PCB does nothing you cannot do with drafting pen, or Letraset, and paper (and a good deal of time). However, this software does make the whole process of circuit board design considerably easier. It is easy to learn and generally well produced. This kind of package will never find mass appeal but for the limited number of Beeb users interested in DIY electronics, Pineapple has provided a most useful product.

Product: P.C.B.
Supplier: Pineapple Software, 39 Brownlea Gds, Seven Kings, Ilford, Essex IG3 9NL. Tel: 01-599 1476
Price: £91.15 inc. VAT