Going PCB ... where to start ?

[Marc Nostromo [M-.-n]]

Hi All,

I'm finally finished with my "nostromotron" and ended up stacking the
original board and the control one in a neat small and concise way:

http://www.marc-nostromo.com/?p=242

Now, because for once I decided to go all the way - i.e. past the "it
works" stage - I'm going to try designing a laser cut sandwich
enclosure and a pcb for the control board.

The enclosure seems pretty "straightforward", there are places here in
Berlin that allow you to upload an Adobe illustrator / pdf file with
the design and go from there.

For the pcb, it's another story. I found this neat video explaining
the basic concepts of using the free version of eagle but - beside the
puzzling amount of resistor / capacitor choices - I quickly ran into
the issue of not having a mcp4822 component for it and couldn't find
any to pick off the web.

Making my own component inside eagle as a first project doesn't seem
like the easiest thing to start with and I'd like not to have cope
with that.

Is there any shortcuts I could take ? What would you bar'ian suggest ?

Thanks
Marc.

--
http://marc-nostromo.com