PCB fabrication

There was a recent article in Archive about using RISCpcb to design pcbs. As I had a need, I tried it, and found it very effective. The article also mentioned JLCPCB.com as a manufacturer.

JLC are in China. They charge £0.32 each for the 5cm square boards in multiples of 5, with about £18 shipping by DHL express. Turnaround is about a week including shipping.

I was very satisfied with the results, but thought it might be preferable to get them made in the UK – cut out the airmiles and probable exploitation. So I asked a UK company to quote.

£30 each for 5 boards with a 10-14 day turnaround! (£250 for faster turnaround.)

Can anyone suggest a more reasonable alternative to China for such things? I have another project approaching.

Have a word over on stardot, lots of wee boards being made over there

Have a word over on stardot

I did. The suggested companies there are, with one exception, also Chinese. The other is in the USA. The USA price, and one or two other UK companies, are 30 to 100 times the Chinese price, which the saving of shipping (for UK) doesn’t even begin to address.

I suspect JLC’s price may be a loss leader, in the expectation that after ordering 5 prototypes, I’ll then order 1000 more, and pay for assembly too. Not going to happen.

I suspect JLC’s price may be a loss leader, in the expectation that after ordering 5 prototypes, I’ll then order 1000 more, and pay for assembly too.

Maybe, maybe not. Having looked at JLC’s offering myself, and having more than a little familiarity with manufacturing small runs of electronic products in the UK, my guess is that JLC are using large volumes and enforced standardisation to optimise the process a lot more than the UK firms can ever hope to do. Just look at what happens to JLC’s price if you deviate from a very, very standard specification for your boards.

The prices that you’ve been quoted for UK manufacture do not sound at all unreasonable, and reflect the set-up costs far, far more than the cost of the product shipped to you. Line set-up for any quantity will take orders of magnitude longer than the time taken to build 5 pieces, and will always take the same time and therefore cost the same regardless of volume. You were quoted £30 each for 5 boards in the UK; I’d risk a guess that you would have been quoted £15 each for 10 boards — especially if, as you now imply, you’re wanting them unpopulated.

From UK firms, you’re probably also paying for someone skilled to take and process the artwork – and let you know if there are any issues before the manufacturing starts.

In contrast, I suspect that JLC are using some level of automation to jigsaw many customers’ designs into large, standardised panels which can be run down a line without the need to make changes to the line setup in between each one. That’s a lot cheaper, but it will need big volumes overall to be viable. IIRC they’re also a lot less certain about picking up errors in your artwork or bills of materials: that is, I have the impression that they’ll just build what you ask for, and it better be what you actually wanted…

Is there a download spot containing small Acorn related PCBs – that can be used to practice with?

Is there a discription of the Kitty Kat file format?

I’ve run two versions through JLC. The first initially omitted the mask layers, as I was still trying to understand the software. I got a prompt reply asking what I wanted to do – no mask, mask with no holes, or re-submit. I rectified the omission and re-submitted.

For the second I asked if they could produce shapes other than a rectangle. The reply “we can do any shape”.

I changed the profile from a rectangle to include several cutouts and some rounded corners. No change to the price or turnaround time.

The wording of the replies suggested strongly that they were composed by a native English-speaker, rather than a translation. Could be a very subtle AI I suppose.

Is there a diagram of the userport podule available?

Is there a way of offsetting the pointer in the desktop – so you can sort of trace in a Paint window – while working in say Draw?

Not that I’m aware of, however if you wish to trace images into Draw, maybe this might be of use?

https://www.davidpilling.com/wiki/index.php/Trace

Try creating new threads for new topics!

It was to try and copy PCBs – Print out the picture of the PCB and use a ‘Tracing Tablet’ to copy the contents into RiscPCB.

The author of RiscPCB didn’t think it good idea to add loading of a Jpeg – to be able to copy it :-(

Could use Draw+ to load sprite into a layer – then over copy the PCB.

Similar to load sprite/Jpeg into ProCad and do a copy from there.

[Edit]
A virtual ‘Tracing Tablet’

I was wondering if RiscPCB program had it background template set to transparent – a Draw+ window with a sprite of a PCB could be seen through from underneath?

Anyone know if the author/s of !CadMust Pcb prog – are contactable?

Try creating new threads for new topics!

+1

I have been making PCBs for around 30 years (god I’m getting old :-)

I don’t think you will find many if any UK firms that will compete with firms like JLC I think since the creation of things like the raspberry pi many of these firms now cater for the hobby market in fact PCB pricing has reduced dramatically in the last few years.

It used to cost around £800 pounds for a 1 off sample PCB in the UK I used to make prototypes on breadboard before committing to a sample PCB because of this reason. Now I just create 5 samples from JLC.

This makes my life a lot easier as most of my designs are RF based and anyone who has worked on RF designs knows that creating a working design is not easy without a good grounded PCB.

Eurocircuits.com fab in Germany and Hungary, Beta Layout fab in Ireland. Both about £80 for 5 off 50×50mm two layer PCBs. The pricing gets better (£3-4 per board) when you head towards 100 off, when the shipping weight from China starts to rise and discounts wear off.

A interesting article in the Archive Msg about using a small mill to make a PCB – handy for making one offs.

I’ve used one of those. They’re pretty useless TBH: they only do single-sided PCBs (unless you flip the board over and are super accurate with registration, and no more than 2 layers), they don’t do soldermask, the drills break all the time, and the track pitch is far worse than a $5 board from China. Only really useful if you desperately need a board today, but there are services like PCBTrain’s 8h service (no soldermask) which you’d have to use a lot to break even the cost of the machine.

I’m sure they’re good at milling out hunks of metal in interesting shapes, but not for PCBs.

I came across this one the other day, https://aisler.net/ , but without any idea of a circuit I can’t tell if it’s as cheap as it appears or not.

I’ve used one of those. They’re pretty useless TBH

They are, indeed. They were in the category of “option of last resort” 25 years ago when I did my Masters project at a company who had the equipment to mill boards out, and I’ve never used one for any kind of prototyping work since then¹.

This whole thread is fascinating, because – as someone who has designed more than a few PCBs over the years – even in my student days I was using Windows-based software with schematic capture and annotation for designing boards. RiscPCB is interesting, but the idea of designing even a simple board without the help of a netlist and footprint library seems like making life unnecessarily hard in 2024. Especially when things like KiCad exist on other platforms for free.

I mean, I even use KiCad to create a schematic and netlist when laying out veroboard, so that I can pass it to VeeCAD and get my track cutting validated before I start…

¹ Not so much because I’ve avoided them, but because nowhere since then has considered them a useful thing compared to getting a stack of prototype boards made at a board house so that they could go through an automated pick and place line like the finished product would be doing.

even in my student days I was using Windows-based software with schematic capture and annotation for designing boards

Interesting. I didn’t realise you were so young, Steve. I’ve not designed a PCB since about 1980; back then I was doing them professionally, freelance, for the likes of Microvitec, Visionhire, & AB Micro – on an A2 lightbox, with dry transfer pads and self-adhesive black crepe tape…

The only PCB that I ever made, I drew with a sort of marker pen and etched using a Maplin kit that was, let’s be honest, horribly messy and unpleasant. I bet that sort of thing has been banned as a biohazard these days.
The board wasn’t very good, but it worked and – thankfully – didn’t require any ICs so didn’t have difficult tolerances. Just some transistors, caps, resistors, the usual basics. But, my god, drilling loads of holes using a stupid little hand drill knacked my wrist.

It’s cool that there are now services to make decent quality boards so nobody has to do all of that stuff themselves. Etching was… ugh…

I drew with a sort of marker pen and etched using a Maplin kit that was, let’s be honest, horribly messy and unpleasant.

Ah, acid etching. I did this once at school, the teacher left them in the tank too long and even the pen isn’t acid proof after a while. Stuck to breadboard or stripboard ever since.

I came across this one the other day, https://aisler.net/ , but without any idea of a circuit I can’t tell if it’s as cheap as it appears or not.

100×80mm, 2 layer HASL, 3 boards, EUR26.89 inc 19% VAT for 8 day turnaround, EUR43.98 for 1 day turnaround. Free shipping to Germany in 2 days, free ‘rest of Europe’ in 2-8 days, faster UPS extra.

So not bad although timewise I’m not sure you save against ordering from China, unless speed is vital.

The thing about hobby projects is there’s often slack in the timeline: if you only get to work on them on the weekend, there’s no point paying for a 24h turnaround if you aren’t going to get a chance to work on it until a couple of weekends time. For a time-is-money industrial project, you can afford to pay some local(ish) firm to fab it for you fast.

I didn’t realise you were so young, Steve.

I am? It would have been Windows 3.1, or possibly ‘95. I don’t remember the software that we used – just that it was about the only thing that we did for the course that wasn’t done on the department’s own dedicated lab of Sun workstations.

For a time-is-money industrial project, you can afford to pay some local(ish) firm to fab it for you fast.

There may also be other considerations, though. As I said, when last looked, JLC stopped being very cheap as soon as you started to ask for things like panelisation or “unusual” material thickness or copper weight. Which is why I suspect that they’re getting the cost down by jigsawing lots of different orders into their own large panels to get the best raw material and line utilisation that they can, then routing the individual boards out and sorting them out into their respective piles at the end. But they have one “standard” material that they use for those panels, and so if you don’t want to use that, you’ll pay for it.

I didn’t realise you were so young, Steve.

I am? It would have been Windows 3.1, or possibly ‘95.

Exactly…I last designed a PCB before Windows 1.0, never mind 3.1 or 95. ( https://clive.semmens.org.uk/Art/TechDrawings.html )