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Electrical Engineers: How much does it cost to put a board into an Engineering Sample?

R

Remedy

Diamond Member
I just want to know cause i have a few Ideas for something. Anyone have an Idea? PM, you still here? 🙂
 
Have you actually built a prototype with your idea yet (ie, with a breadboard and/or solder)? If not I sure wouldn't waste the money on having an engineering sample made. If you already got a product going though I'd say go for it. I have no idea how much it would cost though.

Edit: Stupid me. I forgot about digital simulations (pretty stupid as that's how I've done most of my circuits for Electrical Engineering classes). If you have a working design there then that "counts" as well. 🙂
 
yeah I'd much rather build it by hand than have an engineering sample made.. that's bigbucks I bet.. (but if you do, get the black PCB not the green! 😀 )
 
Well, obviously depends on the size of the project, complexity, cost of components, length of development etc. There isn't a fixed number.
 
I was looking into this once upon a time, for myself. The cheapest I ever found was ~$75, for a 2 layer 3x4" PCB and you had to order at least 5 at a time.
 
Zorba, thnx for the info bro you just crush my fantasy :frown:

Now how many of you actually stil want a Dual Slot A board??🙂
 


<< Zorba, thnx for the info bro you just crush my fantasy :frown:

Now how many of you actually stil want a Dual Slot A board??🙂 >>



Thats kind of a big task for 1 dude to take on 😉
 
I'm sorry, I just have to ask. You guys aren't serious, right? You don't really think you can make your own motherboard, something that teams of educated and experienced engineers do, right? Have you looked at a motherboard and notice that it's not something you can do with a spool of wire and a soldering gun? Just asking.
 


<< I'm sorry, I just have to ask. You guys aren't serious, right? You don't really think you can make your own motherboard, something that teams of educated and experienced engineers do, right? Have you looked at a motherboard and notice that it's not something you can do with a spool of wire and a soldering gun? Just asking. >>



Im not serious. I think orig. poster wanted to. If you had a LOT of spare time it might be doable.I mean you can pull all the chipsets off a board and re-do it. But having 500+ traces would make it hard to put together 😉

 
Designing a motherboard (just the board, not the chipsets and all that are used in them) could well be done by a single person with a decent amount of time (building it by hand would take a while, but if you designed it on a computer and then sent that design to the fab it would be a lot easier). Some people are actually in college taking the classes required to become the guys at Abit, Asus, etc. who design these boards (afterall the people who do that didn't just magically wake up one day and know how to build a motherboard), and the upper level people (read: Juniors and up) are often at that level. I have one Computer Engineering friend of mine who actually designed a sound card for a class project (wasn't a very good one, but it did play sounds). Unfortuneatly I'm not quite up to that level of expertise (best circuits I've built were more or less just simple stuff like muliplexors and calculators that could add/sub/multiply. never even got division working 🙂).
 
I remember back when TEN.NET was a big gathering place for gamers there was a guy who designed motherboards. He always had an engineering sample CPU 33-100mHz faster than anybody else, too. Made a huge difference in gaming, not to mention he was the only guy running around with his memory maxed out on the board. :|

I had the pleasure of breaking into his &quot;secret&quot; one afternoon. He worked for a company that has long since been absorbed by one of the four-letter A*** companies. But back then he was designing high end motherboards for workstations. One of his perks was the ability to take some of his work home with him.

Man it sucked to be on a brandnew $465 P200MMX (with 60ns EDO RAM) and that creep had an engineering sample P2-233 (with this new fad 3v/12ns DIMM junk - who'd thunk!?!) at the time. The ah heck always was ahead of the game. 😱
 
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