▲ 70 points
back
11 comments
Very nice work, I didn't know about Elecrow but I will check them out.
One nit I'd point out is that's it's always best practice to put the pin 1 dot/label outside the footprint for the part. That way anyone else who looks at the board will have a much easier time understanding the layout and if a component was placed incorrectly.
I’ve been using JLCPCB for the last few years and they’ve noticeably stepped up in quality since the single 2018 board that was displayed here. Nothing against Elecrow, they make fantastic boards, too. I’m just kind of impressed that I can have a super high quality board in under a week from a few fab houses now, usually for under $60 shipped. I haven’t seriously used those standard white breadboards for years now.
JLC is awesome. Shipping takes 3x as long as it takes them to make the boards, even with PCBA (which is to say they are fast). I do wish we had the equivalent here in the states to cut down on the shipping time.
Oshpark?
After 6 days of no movement on an Oshpark order, I made the same order on JLCPCB. They both arrived the same day.
oshpark isn't too much more expensive for really small boards.
I don't think anyone is using JLCPCB for the quality.
People use it because it's very cheap, good enough, and they have other services (assembly, association with LCSC that make it even more compelling).
In the US, OSHPark's boards are definitely better quality, but you can't beat the JLC price.
A counterargument: their prices make the "PCB" quality tier available for projects that would previously have been resigned to the lower "ball of bodge wires" or "breadboards/stripboards" levels of quality.
I was recently in a situation where I wanted to fit a new MCU/breakout into an existing PCB designed for a different one. I figured if I liked the results, I could redesign the PCB for a 100% conversion later, but I already had the old boards.
While some of the pinout differences could be papered over in the software, the physical fitment seemed like it would be a tangle of bodge wires or maybe trying to use ribbon cables to tack everything together.
Then I realized PCBs were an option. I could put all the cross-wiring on a PCB about half the size of a baseball card, fab a stack of them for $10 delivered, and have a product that's clean and reliable enough to use without worry.
They're so cheap that I've almost completely given up on breadboarding/protoboarding hobby stuff.
Throw a design together, have it show up a week or so later, solder it together, do some testing, reorder if you goofed up too much or bodge wire the ones you did order (a component I used neglected to mention one of its output was open-collector...)
Admittedly, it does feel a bit wasteful to order 5 of something that is going to be a one-off. Problem is, ordering all the little SMT adapters modern components need and protoboarding it usually costs the same...
Examples:
https://github.com/teknoman117/P80C550-EVN
https://github.com/teknoman117/M68K-BUS-VOLTAGE-CONVERTER
I ended up spending about 6 years (in short bursts) doing this for one project - all the iterations were error-fixing on my part. I started out with OSHPark (I know the owner personally) but I wasn't able to manage $30 a run when I wasn't very good at PCB design to begin with. JLCPCB made iterating on real PCBs possible. I have found JLCPCB's quality to be fantastic. The only exception being I think once the silkscreen looked a little crummy because it was matrix printed (they offer a nicer process, but I was not concerned with it.
I use JLC and haven't run into any quality issues I've personally noticed, but I'm also very new to PCB services. Can you perhaps expand on the quality issues you've faced with JLC?