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Ask HN: Can you recommend a PCB designer?

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Ask HN: Can you recommend a PCB designer?

#1
Did anyone have a good experience and can vouch for their service provider?

I need help with taking a single-board computer (an existing open-source hardware project), converting from Eagle, removing unneeded components, and exporting KiCad/BOM that are ready to send to Eurocircuits/PCBWay/JLCPCB. Of course, the modified design would also be published under an open-source hardware license.

EDIT: Just saw that PCBWay offers design services. [1]

[1] https://www.pcbway.com/design-services.html

Re: Ask HN: Can you recommend a PCB designer?

#4
If the modified will be open-source would you be willing to outline goals of the project on github or gitlab? I'd be happy to take a look. been a while since I've done PCB work I mostly do asic/fpga design now, but depending on the scope I could possibly help.

Re: Ask HN: Can you recommend a PCB designer?

#7
Out of curiosity, which SBC? Helios4 / Helios64 by any chance?

One gotcha could be that if some of the specified components aren't available (or, worse yet, EOL'd with no pin-compatible replacement), that could would necessitate more PCB work.

This is coming from someone who is annoyed at ESD441 being out of stock at LCSC and Digikey.

Re: Ask HN: Can you recommend a PCB designer?

#9

I've had decent luck with random people on Fiverr, of all things...

My ex business partner did the hardware design for our prototype and scored a super helpful brilliant guy out of Nigeria on Fiverr that walked him through everything he needed. So I can honestly recommend this route.

The use case we had was actually pretty similar to OP, we had some basic design in EasyEDA and were looking to bring it to the next level for proper prototyping.

The business failed for several other reasons, but lack of solid hardware design (admittedly, ours was a pretty simple design) was not one of them.

Fiverr honestly goes pretty hard if you are running lean. I saved about an order of magnitude on trademark fees by having someone on Fiverr who had done them many times before walk me through the process instead of paying a lawyer to do it. I’ve also used it in the past to get acceptable (not great, but good enough to put on contractual letterhead) logo designs for extremely reasonable pricing

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