PCB fabrication

Thank you for that info – did you take any pics of the old system?

Seems to remember sticking bits of acid resistant ‘paper’ on a copper board – but may be wrong:-(

In the Archive mag – there was no pics of the milled board (mirror image) :-(

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.

Yes, that’s the ‘pooled PCB’ concept. The manufacturing panels are large (ballpark 1 metre). Normally on a production run you panelise your project, ie repeat to fit in the size of the panel (eg a 10×10cm PCB would get 100 on one 1×1m panel, before wastage), and they run N panels through the line to get as many boards as you need.

In a pooled PCB they put multiple designs on the same panel, and run several panels (eg for 5 of one design, put each board on the panel once and run 5 panels; for 10 boards put it on twice and run 5 panels). When doing this you have to use the same manufacturing settings across the whole panel. This is a different way of doing things than a traditional line which is optimised for volume production – it is best to conform to their defaults, rather than you as customer calling the shots.

JLC have enough scale that they now have 4 subcontractors across China, who specialise in different options: 2 layer in a few factories, 4 layer in another, flex PCBs in another. Then the boards are sorted based on your choices (the 1.0mm thickness goes on one panel, the 1.6mm on another). The fancier options tend to take longer as they wait for enough submissions with a particular set of parameters to come in, and maybe those are run on smaller panels (hence higher cost). But their scale is vast so it probably won’t be long before they can collect enough submissions to fill a panel with any combination of options they offer.

Strange Parts did a video from inside their factory showing the process, another from their flex PCB factory and one on assembly from competitor PCBWay

It seems that KiCad PCB designer runs on Raspberry Pi’s (Linux) – has anyone tried Kitty Cad?

[Edit]

That’s on the Ti or Pi.