Custom PCB Companies

[BrownTown]

I am currently working on my senior design project in electrical engineering and we will be needing a two custom PCBs. One will be VERY simple with only a few LEDs and buttons and only needs to be a once sided PCB. The other is considerably more complex with ~100 components and will be a 2-sided PCB that will be maybe 6"x8". I was wondering if any of ya'll had ordered custom PCBs and new where to get good deals (along with *decent* quality) for simple 1 sided PCBs and/or more complex 2-sided PCBs. Right now I am looking at Express PCB since they seem to be very professional and there software is looks easy to use, however for the simple PCB the 55$ up front cost seems a little steep. Does anyone know of other companies with better deals, or has worked with this company and has reviews of their work?

 

[Mark R]

I've had a few boards done by Olimex. They're friendly, cheap and the boards are of decent quality (although they don't have the state of the art fine manufacturing equipment of other places, like Express PCB).

They have standard proto packages. One is a size of 4" x 6", and the other a size of 8" x 12". However, they will merge and copy and cut as many of your boards as will fit on a standard size package for no additional charge.

Some pics of one of my projects:
Front
Back

I got about 10 of these boards made on a single 4"x6" package. Total cost was something like $30 including insured shipping - though I suspect prices will be a bit higher now.

 

[BrownTown]

So i see you are using surface mounted components, I have no experience in soldering these devices and was going to try to ignore them completely, did you do all the soldering by hand and if so how did you solder those tiny ass leads?

 

[Analog]

I am a prof in EE, and I run our senior design course. Most of our seniors do not go to the lengths of making a PC board because a wire-wrapped or point to point soldered prototype is usually adequate. Designs that are high speed or require RF components are another story, however. That's when I see them make their own boards. We have a local supplier (Saturn electronics) that does this for us, but we have a special deal through them. As far as surface mount goes, we have special soldering instruments for that type of packaging. SMT requires special soldering tips, paste and flux. Look into Metcal equipment, and see if the department may want to buy some of their equipment. Or, see if the department may look into getting a donation from Metcal. That's what we did.

I'm interested in what you're doing - what type of project is it? I wish you the best in this pursuit.

 

[Aluvus]

Originally posted by: BrownTown
So i see you are using surface mounted components, I have no experience in soldering these devices and was going to try to ignore them completely, did you do all the soldering by hand and if so how did you solder those tiny ass leads?

Surface mount soldering by hand is very doable with good equipment (fine tips for your iron and fine solder are two very good steps in the right direction, a good temp-regulated iron is also very helpful), and a little practice. I would venture to guess that the board Mark R showed was done by hand. Alternately, you can buy some solder paste and use a toaster oven as a makeshift reflow oven. This works very well for single-sided boards, not always so well for double-sided boards.

I've only had experience buying PCBs from PCB Express (not Express PCB). Overall experience was fine, but if I'd been paying for it I would've found someone cheaper.

After Googling Olimex, I stumbled across this comparison of Olimex and Gold Phoenix, this review of Gold Phoenix (which links to a review of some other services) and a cost calculator that you might give a whirl.

 

[Colt45]

Soldering SMT is cake... then again I have to do it all the time.

I've heard good things about olimex.

If you want someone stateside you can try 4pcb.. they have a student plan where there's no minimum order and you get pizza. haha. never tried them myself though. http://www.4pcb.com/index.php?load=content&page_id=134

 

[sciencewhiz]

A lot of places give you the option of ommitting the solder mask to save money. If you aren't good at soldering, the solder mask may save you, and is well worth the money.

Pay close attention to the minimum dimensions that the manufacturer quotes, and add some extra tolerance. For example, if they quote 8 mils minimum trace size and 7 mils minimum spacing, do at least 10 mils for each.

As Mark said, it's often cheaper to combine 2 boards into 1 big board. There may be a fee to use a router to make it so the boards break away from each other, but it should be cheaper then two boards. If looks aren't an issue, just leave an inch between the two boards and use a hacksaw to cut it.

Don't trust the design rule check of the software you are using, manually verify that you haven't made any big mistakes by printing each page separately and making sure there are no traces crossing, etc. If you are really paranoid, print both layers on transperencies and make sure everything lines up. If the board software doesn't import a net list, this is a great way to verify that you connected everything correctly per your schematic.

If you were able to get all your parts as through hole, don't bother with trying to do SMT since you don't have any experience. It is doable, but wait until you are a little more experienced.

 

[BrownTown]

Originally posted by: Analog
I am a prof in EE, and I run our senior design course. Most of our seniors do not go to the lengths of making a PC board because a wire-wrapped or point to point soldered prototype is usually adequate. Designs that are high speed or require RF components are another story, however. That's when I see them make their own boards. We have a local supplier (Saturn electronics) that does this for us, but we have a special deal through them. As far as surface mount goes, we have special soldering instruments for that type of packaging. SMT requires special soldering tips, paste and flux. Look into Metcal equipment, and see if the department may want to buy some of their equipment. Or, see if the department may look into getting a donation from Metcal. That's what we did.

I'm interested in what you're doing - what type of project is it? I wish you the best in this pursuit.

Where I go to school (Vanderbilt) the senior design projects are sponsored by companies, the one I am working on is sponsored by Bonitron which is a small company in Nashville that makes different power supply and control type equipment. The project basically involves taking the inputs from multiple thermostats and running multiple A/C and heater units so as to conserve energy. The logical diagram is really pretty simple. I plan to use a simple 2$ PIC microcontroller to do all the work, however that is the easy part from my standpoint. The bigger problem is that the system is designed to run off 120V power and sends and receives signals at 24V AC. So Basically we have to convert 120V power to 18V and 5V DC power for the electronics, and convert 24V AC to 5V DC for the inputs, and the other way around for the outputs. Power conversion is something not taught at Vanderbilt (incidentally last year they removed AC power completely, so now you can go through and get an EE degree without ever once learning about alternating current. All the focus is on microelectronics and digital stuff), so this is where the problem will be for me. The product is meant to be something that can actually be marketed and sold, so that is why it uses a real PCB, we also are putting it in a NEMA 10 case that can be bolted to a wall and the I/O all goes into a 1 inch metal conduit.

TBH the thing that is worrying me the most is trying to solder all those pieces together since I am not a patient person and tend to screw soldering up pretty bad. The microcontroller just runs a loop until the cows come home where it more or less is a finite state machine, it almost seems like overkill, but seeing how dirt cheap microcontrollers are you might as well use one, in fact I think I'm gonna order more like 5 so that we can use one in a test circuit and have spares for when I screw something up and fry a couple.

Originally posted by: sciencewhiz
If you were able to get all your parts as through hole, don't bother with trying to do SMT since you don't have any experience. It is doable, but wait until you are a little more experienced.

This is currently my plan, I had originally looked at a CPLD that used BGA and realised there was no way for that, so I went to the PIC processor in a 40pin DIP module.

Originally posted by: sciencewhiz
Don't trust the design rule check of the software you are using, manually verify that you haven't made any big mistakes by printing each page separately and making sure there are no traces crossing, etc. If you are really paranoid, print both layers on transperencies and make sure everything lines up. If the board software doesn't import a net list, this is a great way to verify that you connected everything correctly per your schematic.

I plan to do this as well since I will be using 120V AC and 24V AC on the board which isn't exactly what the design rules are checking for.

 

[bignateyk]

PCB Express.

They even have a free PCB design tool that is alot easier to use than most other tools (no autoroute though...). Fairly cheap as well... 3 3.5" boards for 50 bucks or something. Gets a little pricier as your board gets bigger.