[HN Gopher] From Idea to Printed Circuit Board in One Week
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From Idea to Printed Circuit Board in One Week
Author : mooreds
Score : 51 points
Date : 2021-02-27 15:33 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (patchr.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (patchr.io)
| mNovak wrote:
| Where I see a tiny bit of room for competition against e.g.
| JLCPCB, especially for a US company, is in rapid low quantity PCB
| fab _and assembly_.
|
| The offshore fabs are rapidly dropping prices for PCBA, which is
| great, but if your parts aren't in their stock, it'll take a 20+
| days while they wait to get it shipped in. It's surprising they
| don't seem to have good distribution nearby, but as far as I can
| tell, JLC will actual import things in from Mouser or Digikey,
| only to turn them around to you 24hr later.
| codebje wrote:
| I've used JLC for PCBA. They use LCSC for parts, and have a
| separate inventory. You can only get parts that LCSC stock
| assembled, which is a pain - I ordered and soldered a QFP-144
| part myself because it's not in their list.
|
| But A$120 got me two partially assembled boards, in a few
| weeks, which isn't terrible at all.
|
| (I used EasyEDA for this design, to get better access to JLC's
| parts catalogue, but it was a worse overall experience than
| using KiCAD, and I still had to fix up some parts' rotation
| anyway.)
| hettygreen wrote:
| One of the first PCB designs I did was with some proprietary
| software like this that was tied to a fabrication company. It was
| the easiest route at the time to getting something "done", since
| all the proper PCB design packages required a lot more work.
|
| Yes it worked, but for the second project I wanted to do some
| things outside of their capabilities and other PCB fab houses
| were fractions of the price. So I had to basically start from
| scratch again and learn KiCad, wishing I had just gone that route
| from the start and not wasted time and money.
|
| Now I'm pretty "OK" with KiCad and just finished a large board
| with about 1000 components that I sent to a fab house for pick-
| and-place assembly. I was able to shop the design around and pick
| the fab house I wanted to work with after talking with them
| directly and sending them industry-standard GERBER files
| generated directly from KiCad. Excellent.
|
| So I guess my long-winded advice is to bite the bullet and learn
| a real PCB design program.
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| What's the price for the EDA? Can I download my designs or is it
| cloud only?
| tpmx wrote:
| I was resigned to start the nth project to make a "simple but
| powerful enough" PCB design tool when I had a second, more
| indepth look at JLPCB's EasyEDA tool and realized I could
| actually work it without getting frustrated.
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EasyEDA)
|
| Yes, it's PRC-based, but it's free to use and outputs portable
| Gerber files. For my hobby (or small-scale commercial) projects
| it will be fine.
| jpm_sd wrote:
| Horizon is developing a good reputation. I haven't tried it yet
| (I'm a daily Altium user) but keep meaning to give it a whirl.
|
| https://github.com/horizon-eda/horizon
| sokoloff wrote:
| KiCAD is really quite good and surely good enough that you'd be
| better off trying and proving that wouldn't work for you before
| starting another one.
|
| It has an easy path to Gerber output for PCB manufacturing and
| a slightly more involved path to JLCPCB PBC manufacturing and
| SMD assembly.
|
| Starting cold (but with some Eagle experience years ago), I
| downloaded KiCAD and completed a simple breakout board in a
| single evening for family Halloween costumes. Ordered them on a
| Tuesday and had them the next Monday for around $30 for 10
| boards.
| Ccecil wrote:
| Second that. I had limited experience with Eagle and just
| jumped into Kicad and was amazed at how much easier it was to
| use. So much less painful. Hotkeys are well defined and
| logical. Libraries are miles ahead and things like making new
| footprints is very easy. Ability to add logos and pictures to
| silk (or copper) easily. A few years ago Kicad was "a decent
| competitor" and now I believe they are actually way further
| along than that. Maybe some people who used other tools like
| Altium can chime in but from what I saw Kicad is
| amazing...and seems to have a very active dev community.
| Anyone looking to get into Kicad I recommend watching some of
| the very well done tutorials on Youtube (I watched "Phil's
| lab" and "contextual electronics" tutorials in my case).
| madengr wrote:
| I tried KiCAD, but having used Altium for 26 years, I'm
| sticking with Altium. KiCAD could not do simple things like
| assign nets to arbitrary polygons, which is critical for RF
| layouts. The DRC was really lacking too.
|
| Of course it's probably great for an open source project,
| but I don't know anyone using it professionally. We have 20
| Altium license at work, and I have one at home for my
| consulting business. Even at $2k/year maintenance, that's
| cheap compared to the other RF software I use.
|
| The whole problem with free CAD software is you'll never
| get the cross discipline skills needed to develop it
| without paying someone. For example you need an expert at
| electromagnetics AND scientific programming AND UI design,
| etc. That's a full time job, not a hobby. There is a ton of
| domain specific knowledge.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Chris Gammell's (Contextual Electonics and KiCon organizer)
| "Getting to Blinky"[0] is really excellent and my go-to
| recommendation.
|
| It's not updated to the latest KiCAD, but it's still very
| useful.
|
| [0] - https://youtu.be/BVhWh3AsXQs
| Ccecil wrote:
| That was the one :)
|
| On Phil's lab I watched "KiCad STM32 + USB + Buck
| Converter PCB Design and JLCPCB Assembly" which is even
| more in depth and longer...but it missed some tricks
| which Contextual Electronics had (such as drawing one
| wire through components in a voltage divider to link all
| of them).
|
| I recommend watching both...and probably more.
| Animats wrote:
| I was a big KiCAD fan, until they dropped the autorouter. I
| had a board I'd designed that was routed with the autorouter,
| and I wanted to add a resistor. Couldn't do that. Grrr.
|
| "Oh, you should route your board manually" I hear from KiCAD
| fans. No.
| tpmx wrote:
| In my quest for a usable PCB design tool easily usable
| autorouting was a clear requirement - I mean, I had been
| reading about them since the 80s in electronics mags.
|
| The autorouter in EasyEDA worked quite well for me when
| testing it. I was able to get it running within a few
| minutes without spending many hours watching youtube
| videos.
| sokoloff wrote:
| There is freerouting which interfaces to KiCAD. (It's not a
| perfect solution, but it's also not void.)
|
| https://freerouting.org/freerouting/using-with-kicad
| Animats wrote:
| Not quite. [1]
|
| It's become weird. Freerouting apparently isn't
| repeatable. Run it twice, get a different layout. Ouch.
| There are lots of forks and tutorials of varying degrees
| of obsolescence.
|
| [1] https://hackaday.io/page/6082-using-freerouting-with-
| kicad-5
| codebje wrote:
| I've ordered boards made with Eagle, KiCAD, and EasyEDA. I'd
| recommend KiCAD of that list, but the first board I did with
| it suffered from the bad defaults for mask distances, and
| none of the fine pitch parts had mask between pins.
|
| It's only a mistake one makes once but having defaults set
| for 1980s fab capabilities is annoying.
| tpmx wrote:
| > but with some Eagle experience years ago
|
| These tools share these very peculiar UX conventions. The
| fact that you once learned Eagle primed you.
| Ccecil wrote:
| This is true. But having used both I find Kicad I am
| constantly saying "ah...what a good way to fix that
| annoying thing eagle does". Workflow is way better IMHO in
| Kicad.
| sokoloff wrote:
| True, which is why I mentioned it, but I was "beyond
| incompetent" at Eagle and always gave up before finishing
| even a single design, so while I knew the basics of how
| PCBs got designed and made, my first commercial PCB ordered
| was that one and I found KiCAD notably easier.
| Youden wrote:
| I'm just fine with KiCAD itself, my real difficulty with it
| comes from importing component footprints and symbols. In
| most of the other eCAD packages, you can click a button, type
| a part number and download the symbol/footprint in-app.
|
| In KiCAD, I haven't found any easy way to go about it, you
| always have to download a ZIP file, extract it, point KiCAD
| to the new symbol library, point KiCAD to the new footprints
| and match the footprints to the symbols.
|
| Is there any better way of handling this?
| kasbah wrote:
| Maybe SnapEDA and their new KiCad plugin [1] would be a
| good fit for you? I've not used the plugin myself but I do
| use SnapEDA footprints myself occasionally. I also try and
| keep on top of all the footprints available on GitHub and
| add them to our repo [2], you can add this globally and
| search through it from within KiCad.
|
| 1: https://blog.snapeda.com/2020/09/09/introducing-the-
| snapeda-...
|
| 2: https://github.com/kitspace/kicad_footprints
| [deleted]
| Animats wrote:
| They're very evasive about pricing. There are many online PCB fab
| houses, and they compete on price. There's no pricing link on the
| home page. If you look at the terms of service, there's a link to
| pricing.[1] It's a bad link.
|
| [1] https://patchr.io/pricing
| ohazi wrote:
| This seems to be a US based company, and none of the US based
| fab houses compete on price. Many don't even want your business
| if you're in the "Idea to PCB in One Week" prototyping phase.
|
| The vast majority still want you to email them a zip file with
| your gerbers and wait for them to manually respond a day later
| with a quote that explicitly ignores half of the
| specs/requirements/quantities that you asked for in your
| original email.
|
| Meanwhile, many of the Chinese houses have automated online
| workflows for both PCB fab and SMT assembly, and competent
| human sales / technical support that responds within the hour,
| and often do a much better job than their (arrogant,
| dismissive, careless, lazy) US counterparts, despite the
| language barrier.
|
| A few US based companies that do well on overall experience
| (but not price) are OSH Park, CircuitHub, and MacroFab.
| joefourier wrote:
| My experience is very similar in Europe - most places want
| you to send gerber files manually, and you are rewarded with
| higher costs and slower turn-around than getting PCBs shipped
| from China. Recently I actually managed to get a set of
| boards with SMT assembly shipped from China faster than bare
| boards from Germany, somehow.
|
| How do those places stay in business? Military contracts?
| Highly specialised boards (e.g. 8+ layers, exotic
| substrates)? Companies paranoid about IP protection?
| madengr wrote:
| Yes. From a Chinese company do you get:
|
| Cross section for analysis. Certificate of conformance for
| all materials used. Testing of controlled impedance
| coupons. Proper waste stream.
|
| I'd never trust a Chinese PCB manufacturer. I have good
| dealings with several USA PCB manufacturers. Of course you
| do pay more, but it's worth it.
|
| Funny that you see these YouTube tours of Chinese PCB
| manufactures. They never show where their waste stream
| goes. When I order from USA manufacture the plating and
| etching fluids are not being dumped in the river.
| kicat wrote:
| There's a lot of negativity here, and I think I understand where
| it's coming from. A lot of you sound like you do this sort of
| work for a living. I am getting into small electronic projects in
| my limited free time.
|
| Things I care about: * Board fabrication AND final assembly *
| Quick turnaround time * Small minimum order size (preferably 1) *
| Help choosing components
|
| Things I DON'T care about: * Getting the absolute cheapest price
| * Being locked into a vendor for a particular project * Tight
| tolerances on things like thermal management or AC signal
| integrity.
|
| I just want to have a custom board for my PIC-based project, or
| my one-off guitar pedal circuit.
|
| I haven't tried this service, but I will. If anyone knows of
| other similar services, I would love to hear about them as well.
| osamagirl69 wrote:
| The web interface of the chinese fab houses directly is way
| better than what these guys offer.
|
| For example JLPCB https://cart.jlcpcb.com/quote?fromDemo=yes
| You first order is $10 including parts and assembly for 5
| boards with 4 day turn (1 for pcb fab, 3 for assembly).
| Typically the boards I have done (comparable to complexity to
| an arduino) are about $20 for 5 copies including fab and
| assembly. They also have a free cad tool called easyEDA
| https://easyeda.com/ but I would really recommend kicad. It
| takes like 5 clicks to go from layout in kicad to boards at
| jlpcb https://support.jlcpcb.com/article/44-how-to-export-
| kicad-pc...
|
| PCBway has a lot more capability, but is a bit more expensive
| https://www.pcbway.com/orderonline.aspx
| buescher wrote:
| There's a bunch of them. Companies like this one have been
| offering free basic Windows design tools locked into their
| service for about 20 years now. I think they are where
| unsuccessful "value EDA" software goes to die.
|
| I used ExpressPCB for a small project back when all these tools
| were very expensive and there weren't any good free ones. I
| found it very easy to use.
|
| If I did not have professional tools available today, I would
| use KiCAD or TinyCAD + FreePCB and pick my board vendor
| independently.
| devwastaken wrote:
| Does this service do things like carbon conductive ink? Been
| designing a gamepad board but haven't found many easy pcb sites
| that list conductive ink.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| This looks great! Are the designs portable? Do I get Gerber
| files,etc?
| jmgao wrote:
| The pricing is extremely non-competitive: $4/sq inch for a single
| copy. For my last PCB order (230mm x 145mm), JLCPCB was $67.18
| for 10 boards, ordered on 2021-02-18 and delivered on 2021-02-23.
|
| Patchr is quoting this for 7 day production time for a single
| board: Price Estimate: $206.80 *
| Not including tax * Not including shipping
| ddeck wrote:
| Agreed. Hostile site also - even after selecting "order your
| pcbs" and creating an account, it won't provide pricing without
| uploading gerbers.
|
| My last JLCPC order was $2 + $4.84 shipping for 5 pieces
| (82x54mm) and was delivered in a few days. I live nearby, but
| it wouldn't have been much more to send to the US.
| [deleted]
| systemvoltage wrote:
| They say "In-house manufacturing", where exactly is that?
| desmap wrote:
| Why is this better than Kicad and printing at eg JLCPCB?
| watermelon0 wrote:
| That's a really badly designed page. There is no:
|
| - pricing info for EDA
|
| - calculator for the board manufacturing
|
| - about/contact us page
|
| - info to where you deliver in 1 week (without any about page,
| it's not even possible to deduce to which country your service
| might be limited to)
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| Copyright info shows 2019, either could have been overlooked or
| the project could have been abandoned. But having updated year
| info doesn't necessarily mean active project as well, as auto-
| incrementing copyright year info is very easy.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| In 2021, I would not recommend using proprietary EDA software and
| locking yourself into a single board house.
|
| For most purposes, you can use the free KiCad EDA package (
| https://kicad.org/ ) combined with a standard PCB vendor like OSH
| Park ( https://oshpark.com/#services ) or JLCPCB (
| https://jlcpcb.com/ )
|
| If you need boards urgently, OSH Park offers a quick turn 2-layer
| service, JLCPCB offers expedited service and shipping, or you can
| check a service like PCBShopper to view multiple PCB providers:
| https://pcbshopper.com/
|
| It's not a good idea to lock yourself and your designs into
| proprietary systems when the alternatives are cheaper and, in the
| case of KiCAD, almost certainly superior.
|
| It's always good to have more options, but I'd want to see
| Patchr.io become more transparent (please show pricing without
| forcing me to create an account first). I'm also highly skeptical
| of any proprietary EDA software that advertises a 30-day free
| trial in the era of KiCAD. KiCAD isn't at the level of
| professional EDA tools yet, but it's more than capable for most
| designs.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Unfortunately if you want some features you have to go
| proprietary, e.g. signal integrity, thermals etc.
|
| It would be a fun project for some enterprising student's
| thesis project (open source signal integrity, for kicad, that
| is). I'm curious what CERN use considering they use KiCAD
|
| Altium probably has the best UX of the EDAs on the market right
| now, but it's all stuck in one glorious thread! The just search
| and drag flow for symbols is a huge boon
| jleahy wrote:
| You can survive without, just.
|
| For thermals you can create an equivalent electrical circuit
| and use SPICE. For power integrity you can mostly make do by
| cascading s-parameters and there is an Excel sheet floating
| around somewhere that'll give you s-parameters for a
| rectangular plane with two arbitrary connections. High-speed
| serial signal integrity is a bit harder, I will admit.
| tpmx wrote:
| To me this seems like a web-based reinterpretation
| (perhaps/probably accidental) of the quite old German "Sprint
| Layout" piece of software (https://www.electronic-software-
| shop.com/lng/en/electronic-s...) - there are probably some more
| tools doing this.
|
| I like the simplicity of this concept, basically, don't bother to
| make a circuit diagram, only focus on drawing the PCB itself.
|
| First impressions of using this beta:
|
| I created a project based on the example PCB.
|
| - My first instinct was to drag a component a little bit to see
| if the routes were updated automatically. It got stuck in
| "processing" for a long time.
|
| - Ctrl-R is overloaded - instead of refreshing the tab when it's
| stuck "processing", it rotates the currently selected component.
|
| - How to change routes wasn't immediately obvious.
|
| I do think the creator would do well to have a close look at what
| made Sprint Layout so easy to learn.
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(page generated 2021-02-27 23:01 UTC)