Cusstom PCB
Feb 1, 2010 at 11:37 PM Thread Starter Post #1 of 14

Thehofl

New Head-Fier
Joined
Jan 20, 2010
Posts
14
Likes
10
I have been looking at custom PCB creation for a bit now and all i can find are insanely expensive prices. Can you guys give me ideas of where you order from?

Thankyou
 
Feb 2, 2010 at 2:31 AM Post #4 of 14
Feb 2, 2010 at 2:40 AM Post #5 of 14
MakePCB
Seeed
Sure-Electronics

I've recently (like, yesterday) tried FlyPCB, though I haven't gotten the boards yet. They seem quite competent and professional, so far.

Seeed are almost always both faster and cheaper than BatchPCB, and the quality is very comparable. Sure-Electronics do pretty good boards at pretty good prices, but their customer service leaves something to be desired. MakePCB do very high quality boards at very attractive prices, and offer a lot of options that other low-volume fab houses don't.
 
Feb 22, 2010 at 9:00 PM Post #6 of 14
I thought I'd update this to add that I received the FlyPCB boards on Saturday - I sent them the Gerbers, and payment, on 01 Feb; the package is postmarked 06 Feb, and they showed up here in the States two weeks later, which is just about the fastest turnaround I've seen yet from a budget-priced PCB fab house in China.

I went with their $40, free-shipping deal. As is usually the case, I wasn't entirely sure what I'd wind up with, but my 40 USD got me twelve double-sided, plated through-hold boards with silkscreen and soldermask, and HASL finishing. The overall quality is quite good; very comparable to BatchPCB, though perhaps not as nice as Seeed or MakePCB. And, hey, their prices are good (I'd have gotten 3 PCBs from BatchPCB for the same price), plus they're very easy people to work with. I recommend 'em...
 
Feb 22, 2010 at 10:14 PM Post #8 of 14
It honestly depends on what your wants/needs are. I use Seeed regularly, and will continue to do so; they closed early for the Chinese New Year, and I used FlyPCB partly because I like to try new fab houses, and partly because I didn't want to wait until after the New Year holidays were over. (I also wanted to try them because I really like OSP as a PCB finish, and they're one of the few places that offer this, though not necessarily on prototypes. Neither Seeed, MakePCB, Golden Phoenix/BatchPCB, Sure Electronics' PCB service, or Olimex offer OSP finishing. Advanced Circuits does, but it's not a "standard" option, and thus excessively expensive, in that boards with OSP will never qualify for any kind of discount.)

Seeed offer very few options, other than solder-mask color, because they're just a middleman for some unspecified board house in China, and PCBs are just a small part of their business. For example, all they offer is HASL finishing - it's very nice HASL, some of the smoothest I've seen, though it may or may not be lead-free. Seeed's pricing is better only for the kind of prepackaged offers they have - when they offer it (they shutdown their PCB service early for the Chinese New Year) a comparable offer to the FlyPCB $40 offer would be ~$32.50, and you can actually get that down to ~$27.50 if you choose to skip electrical testing. Seeed insist on a minimum 8/8 trace/space, and a minimum 10mil hole size.

Seeed's "regular" fabrication is $50 + $0.12 per square centimeter.

On the other hand, FlyPCB offer all the options of a full-fledged fab house, because that's what they are. So, for people who like to use BatchPCB for prototypes, and then use Golden Phoenix for "production" boards, because they like knowing that WYSIWYG, FlyPCB is probably a very attractive alternative - get prototypes fabbed on 1.6mm 1oz green-soldermask HASL boards, fairly cheap, then have production boards made by the same company, only with, say, OSP finishing and black soldermask, on 2oz 2mm boards, or whatever. Their prototype service is 8/8 trace/space, the same as Seeed, but they'll do as low as 4/4, apparently.

FlyPCB's "quoted" prices are (for double-sided boards) $50 setup + $0.16 (or less) per square inch, and I suspect they might go slightly lower if you email them for a quote.

Like I said, I'll continue to use Seeed, particularly when I'm doing boards that involve very fine-pitch SMD semiconductors. (Their HASL is smooooooth.) They are - for what they offer - pretty much the cheapest place going, and their turnaround time is fairly decent, for an overseas fab house. They're not a fab house, though, so their ability to offer support is limited. FlyPCB, on the other hand, are very nice to deal with, know what they're doing, provide a very high-quality product, and offer substantially better pricing on production boards than Seeed... or Golden Phoenix, for that matter - and their basic boards are at least on par with GP, and probably better.

(Golden Phoenix offer 155 square inches of one design for $99, for 1oz 1.6mm FR4, HASL. Seeed would charge $175 or so for the same thing; FlyPCB would do it for about $75. Admittedly, Golden Phoenix would get it to you slightly faster, but if you're purely trying to find the cheapest place... Seeed isn't even close, and FlyPCB is 25% cheaper than GP. MakePCB, my current favorite for production PCB fabrication, would do it for +/-$5 of what FlyPCB charge - I make it out to be 56 Euros / $76, but the exchange rate varies - but the MakePCB boards would be gold-plated for that price.)

The "tl;dr" version: Both have their strengths and weaknesses. Seeed are cheaper for prototypes, and offer marginally higher-quality PCBs, albeit with no real options except soldermask color. FlyPCB are an actual board house with a lot of options, and offer significantly more attractive pricing than Seeed - or any of the other "usual suspects" - once you get to even small-volume / hobbyist production runs.
 
Feb 23, 2010 at 1:28 AM Post #10 of 14
There was some question on Sure Electronics' website whether they do thru-hole plating or not? One person asked about it and got

Quote:

Can you still not plate the holes? does this mean there is no connection from the top side to the bottom side?
Quote:

Originally Posted by hilo90mhz 2009-03-20 15:51:19
Dear sir,
Thanks for your interest in our items.
We are sorry that we don't provide PCB Manufacture Service for now.
Best wishes





 
Feb 23, 2010 at 3:38 AM Post #11 of 14
They do through-hole plating, yes. They even did it back then, so I have no idea what they were talking about - just one example of their less-than-stellar support. They do decent work at a fair price, and reasonably quickly, but you very much need to know what you're doing, as their support isn't particularly helpful.

Interestingly, I believe Sure are the only PCB provider I've used who do not plate mounting holes. Maybe that, and a language barrier, are where the confusion comes from?
 
Feb 23, 2010 at 3:58 AM Post #12 of 14
Surprisingly, Gold Phoenix did not plate the mounting holes on my grubDAC proto boards. That is usually a higher cost option as it requires a second pass for drilling after the rest of the holes are plated.
 
Feb 23, 2010 at 4:23 AM Post #13 of 14
Surprising, indeed. All the many, many boards I've had done through BatchPCB had plated mounting holes, and I don't think the one board I did directly with GP even had mounting holes, though I could be wrong, as I don't have any of the boards anymore. That was several years ago, at any rate...

Oh, and if anyone cares, I looked through my Big Drawer of PCBs, and it looks like the fine folks at MakePCB.com didn't plate the mounting holes on any of the boards I had done there, either - I was misremembering the prototypes I'd done of those same boards with BatchPCB. (The bare PCB in the link in my signature was fabbed by MakePCB.)

I kind of wonder how they work out what to de-plate and what to leave plated? The absence of annular rings?
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top