PCB Manufacturing, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
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- Опубліковано 21 лип 2024
- In this video, I review my experiences and highlight the pitfalls that can be avoided when selecting a PCB vendor to manufacture PCBs for your personal or open source projects. Three vendors are discussed and by the end of the video it is revealed which of the vendors are found wanting.
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I have recently devised my first PCBs for a railroad layout (just some boards to control a latching relay for point motor and its indicator leds). I sent my design to PCBWay...and I was surprised. They built the boards within the next 24 hours at a very affordable price, and it took only 4 additional days to send them from China to Spain. No issues on customs. The quality of the boards was great. I'm very satisfied, indeed.
I use JLCPCB. Most of my projects are less than 10x10cm. I find that their quality is on par with PCBWay but are less expensive.
It gets even better (or worse, for PCBway) with bigger boards. For example, a bog standard 2 layer board of 287.02x260.35mm(11.3x10.25 inches) is 25€ on JLCPCB but 105€ Euro on PCBWay. And on JLC I can see the detailed charge costs, like 3.65€ engineering fee and 6.75€ large size fee.
Even as a ENIG board it would still be less than half the price then HASL on PCBway (56€).
I was looking at the price to produce my LightUpHannukiah (andrewsawesome) boards. PCBWay wanted $50 (without shipping). JLCPCB was $10.40 (without shipping) and $23.71 (shipped to US). Their cheapest "Global Direct Line" shipping was handled by YunTrack, and was super fast and easy to track. They didn't cut the PCBs perfectly, and the silkscreen isn't always the best quality, but overall, they are a very good choice
I am a hobbyist. Over the last 10 years, I have ordered over 200 small boards from OSH-Park. I use 6/6 design rule and make 2 layer prototype boards. In all that time, I have had one bad board which was a bridge on one of the 3 boards. They are much cheaper for small ENIG boards in small quantity. I'm not changing.
Thanks for your comment. From the people I've spoken with who have used oshpark you seem to be the exception to the rule. Great that you've had success with them. For me, the number of people that have had problems with them that I've heard about, and my experience, puts them in the never-again zone for PCB manufacturing. My experience says that virtually anyone is better than them.
Thanks for this video! I've been using PCBWay for a couple of years, I did order one set of boards through JLCPCB a while back and they were fine, but it's good to know that someone printing the quantity of boards you do really believes in them. It saves me from wandering off and trying several providers for no reason.
Really great info. I had been leaning toward PCBway or JLCPCB for my first test boards, just because they sponsor most of the UA-camrs who create things I like. But, this cements it.
This video randomly appeared for me tonight and I watched, liked and subscribed. I really like your calm and constructive analysis I've tried OSHPark and PCBWay and whilst my OSHPark experience was quite some years ago now, I do recall it seemingly taking for ever for the boards to ship. I look forward to watching more of your content
Thank-you very much for your feedback! Truly appreciated. I hope you do find my future content to be interesting and entertaining.
Ditto on your comments about PCBWay's customer service. I haven't used them yet on fabricating a PCB, but I have a couple aluminum parts I want to be made. One of them is a 4mm sheet metal seat rack for my motorcycle. It has 2 bends, plenty of cutouts (for lightening the design), and both threaded and non-threaded holes. For some reason my 3D CAD tool when exporting the design out to the .STEP file format flattens the design out. So, I sent a picture showing the 3D rendering, the flat .STEP rendering, and the original design that shows the bend lines with location and bending radius measurements to find out if they could still build this project with a combination of the .STEP file and the bend line information. A customer service rep on their chat messenger responded within a couple minutes and said she would ask one of their engineers. Within 10 minutes, I had an answer, that although they would really prefer the .STEP file to correctly show the bends, they could still build it with the additional information provided.
I have tried many but now use only 2 suppliers. JLCPCB and PCBWay. I used to be exclusively PCBWay but their delivery after Europe changed import duties last year became sporatic. Recently they have been delivering ok again.
What exactly do you mean by sporatic? I'm teetering between the two since they both seem very capable and high quality, but I also heard that JLC now has a warehouse in europe which may decrease shipping time even more. Or would it be more sensible to use both based on which one is better for a particular board design?
For the OSH Park boards I am now wondering if that is the problem on a set I ordered. It was for the open-source Super Snapshot clone. I soldered together 3 of them and none of them worked. I have previously used OSH Park and had good success. But I am only ordering three, not large batches. Maybe I should try PCBWay for those. Was your OSHPark boards all defective? How did you test?
I am honestly not surprised to hear your story of disappointment. Initially I too thought it was my fault (as it was the very first cartridge I had ever reverse engineered). After testing my initial build, and finding it non-functional, I examined the second board. I did this under my tri-ocular microscope that I use for all of my soldering. You've probably seen it on my bench behind me in the videos. With this scope, I have the ability to zoom in to incredible magnifications. Using this method, I examined every square millimeter of the board at an extremely high resolution. It is in this way that I was able to discover a copper bridge between two traces. Essentially, due to poor manufacturing, the copper was not removed between the two traces in question, routing the signal path incorrectly. This is what rendered the cartridge in-operable.
I would not at all be surprised if this error existed across all three of your OSHpark boards rendering your efforts a failure.
@@8BitResurgence Oh Wow. Thanks for the info. I will try to examine the one board I have left.
@@8BitResurgence Well after further testing and ordering new PCBs from JLCPCB I can confirm that you were right on the money! The problem was indeed the OSH Park PCBs. Every single one of them was bad. Shorted traces. I put together 1 out of the 10 I ordered from JLC and it fired right up. I am now in the process of ordering all new boards to replace all the various PCBs I got from OSH. Ridiculous that they don't have better quality control. I paid $38 from OSH Park for those 3 PCBs and I ordered 10 ENIG from JLCPCB and it cost $24.
@@RacerX- Glad you got to the bottom of it. Ya, my take on Oshpark is their service is not worth the aggravation.
We all believe you, that you got no benefits at all from PCBWay for everything you tell your viewers in this video 🙏🤣
Like it or not, the facts speak for themselves.