Resume, Projects, Blog

I’ve used relatively few board houses; however, this page will just record my basic thoughts on those that I have used.

JLCPCB

Fast, Cheap, and Effecitve. They’re my current go to. If you use EasyEDA you can even get pretty multi-colour silk screen (Seriously wanting this feature to be expanded out to more general support, but for now I’ll remain solidly tempted to swap tools to try out pretty silk screens). Their biggest downside is their lack of support for blind and burried vias. While nobody should want such things on 2 layer boards, and few should want it on 4 layer boards, it really does become a reasonable request on 6 or more layers. JLCPCB goes up to 20 layers. I cannot imagine doing a 20 layer board which has nothing but full through vias, seriously would your vias start to obstruct the integrity of the board. That being said relatively cheap and easy to setup PCBA is a game changer. I don’t want to hand solder another 0402 in my life and if I can find fully basic parts in the PCBA library for JLC. Then on effort and time of hand assembling tiny components.

Getting ready for doing a first order that includes their full coloured silk screen and am admittedly quite excited for the process. Simply getting a board that is more visually interested off the bat even before populating it.

OSH Park

Faster and more reliable than other fabricators, their purple boards have a slightly distinctive look to them. And they aren’t so much more expensive as to be impractical in general prototyping. At $5 - $20 per square inch, they are good when you need fast, relatively cheap, high quality prototype boards.

ITead Studio

This service was end of lifed at some point between when I last used them and when I went to write this. They were my first board house; however, there were definite reasons to switch. And I’m not surprised that the cheaper, higher quality, and easier to use JLCPCB took over.

Local Board Houses

A lot of these places have been being driven out of business by the substantially cheaper, and relatively fast services overseas. However, before the one in Calgary went bankrupt I used them a couple of times. They made it quite obvious with thier boards how low quality comparitively other manufactuerers are. But if it still does the job and is cheaper then why would you care. There are several board houses I hope to add to this list in time; however, there are a couple of things worth noting.

• I don’t want to talk to someone. A lot of these domestic companies seem to reject the idea of even giving a ballpark estimate prior to looking at the PCB. I’m sorry, but this is insane. If the cost is double what an overseas manufacturer is able to do, I might pay happily for some of your more advanced features, but I’m not going to pay ten times the cost unless I absoltely cannot do without those features. I do not want to have to say, um yeah you’re nice and all, but I can get colour silkscreen printing for dollars overseas and all you’re offering me is the ability to shave my prototype down slightly. Yeah if it does hit fabircation then I’ll want better specs, but that can come down the road when whatever company is fabricating the final design can use a team of fabrication engineers to optimize the design. It’s not worth it to me at these stages.
• You need to get loyal locals. And I’ve tried to form relationships with board houses to be able to help students with information about said board house, and clean clear instructions on how to order. Frankly local domestic board houses should be jumping up and down to partner with universities to help students order boards enmass through thier services as opposed to others. If you want a broader customer base, having a class worth of students be expected to order from you should be a dream come true. If I say I want a rush order this time next year for next group of students, you should likely just give that to me at whatever your best rate could be, so that all those students turn around and come back. If I say I need you to setup a discount code that’ll only ship on one specific day, and only ship to the Univeristy. That sort of thing should be something you want to set up at all costs.

Features I want to TRY!

PCBWay is on my to try list. But mainly for some of their advanced features that simply speak to me for their weird, but interesitng possibilities.

• I want to try blind and burried vias in my designs. I’ve had cases where they’d help dramatically, but I haven’t used them because it didn’t offer enough benefit tp justify going with a different board house.
• I want to try carbon ink pcbs. Assuming that these could be used as resistances and not simply controlled impedance traces, it might be a wonderful system for limiting component counts.
• I want to try cavity pcbs. I think it would be very interesting to shrink a design by literally stacking components on top of one another. Combined with mounting PCBs onto one another, it might make a great way to have some truely high density designs in three dimensions which is not a common way to shrink your system.