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Designing and assembling my first PCB

vilkeliskis.com

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Re: Designing and assembling my first PCB

#31

Post by cozzyd »

lefra wrote: post #30
YZF wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DigiKey used to be a good place to get. Also design for parts you can get... In the old days you could also get samples from chip companies if you asked nicely. No idea if anyone still does that.

Some still do, but they'll only send to businesses, not to individuals. What's annoying for me is Digikey and friends insisting on only delivering with express carrier. I'd like to have a cheaper, slower option.

USPS is def an option for Digikey...

(not that I use it since they don't deliver to our loading dock)

Re: Designing and assembling my first PCB

#32

Post by zerobees »

dhosek wrote: post #11

OK, so people are ordering a custom PCB from China for a one-off? Whatever happened to making them at home? I remember my brothers doing this in the bathroom sink with a board coated with copper¹, some special markers to draw the circuit on the board and chemicals to wash off the extra copper. I’m guessing they might have used our dad’s electric drill to put some holes in the board as well, but looking at the article…

In addition to what others said, home-etched PCBs are just much lower quality. We're no longer living in a world where every component has leads on a 2.54 mm grid, so tolerances matter a lot more. Also, SMD means you really need vias and a solder mask.

The problem isn't that people outsource it, it's that they need to outsource to China. That's an abject failure of domestic PCB manufacturers who simply don't want to deal with retail customers.

Re: Designing and assembling my first PCB

#33

Post by taylor-tg »

krapht wrote: post #17
1024bits wrote: post #5

JLCPCB is often the manufacturer of choice with DIY PCBs, and the reputation is well deserved. I recommend them as well, have never had an issue with what they've made. It's a bit pricier for a one-off board given the MOC, so it's preferable to do some sort of group buy if you can.

Slight tangent: a long time ago when I was into this hobby, Oshpark was usually the go-to instead of JLCPCB. What happened to them? Macrofab too if anyone's used them.

I don't think anything necessarily happened to OSHPark so much as JLC became the default for a lot of people. I find the defining factor is just consistency mixed with capabilities. Even if one could conceivably get a specific PCB stackup quicker from a US company, being able to order basically any type of PCB (and increasingly more than just PCBs) from a single vendor is a pretty significant value-add.

There are US shops like Advanced Circuits that can turn boards around extremely quickly, but obviously you are paying for that speed. Most people ordering a handful of boards for a hobby project, or prototype are probably optimizing more for cost and consistency than shaving a few days off the lead time.

Once someone finds a vendor where they know the quality will meet whatever their own subjective minimum is, there's not much incentive to shop around. Being able to tack on assembly at JLC with a single checkbox also exponentially increases the desire to just stick with that vendor.

Re: Designing and assembling my first PCB

#34

Post by bschwindHN »

tadasv wrote: post #26
bschwindHN wrote: post #23

Wow, very very similar to my first PCB, a breakout board for the TSL4531. I ordered it from OshPark back in 2016. Used the exact same soldering iron, and a Quick hot air station, though it's the less fancy one than you have. https://github.com/bschwind/tsl4531-module https://imgur.com/ozk7UuS (sorry for imgur, not sure what people use for image hosts these days) I then went on to also make a BME280 breakout: https://…

It's so funny that you had a similar idea. Are you an electrical engineer or swe? What are you building these days?

I work on software and a bit of hardware for my job, at tonari. It's basically a low latency video "portal" to connect spaces. My most recent hardware project was to add an OLED display + rotary encoder dial to the product. That was a fun project, and it turned out great! It was also my first time doing a 4 layer board and having to worry at least a little bit about EMI and all that. All my previous stuff has been lower speed 2 layer stuff, like a custom mechanical keyboard.

Re: Designing and assembling my first PCB

#35

Post by lrasinen »

geerlingguy wrote: post #8
tadasv wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was actually very surprised myself. As I mentioned in the post, I don't do that type of work so it's all new to me. This got me also interested in CAD. You can design parts and don't need to own the 3d printer, could just get parts manufactured online.

Yeah, and since it seems there's some competition there, the prices are decent. You can get milled metal, 3D prints, populated PCBs... crazy what you can do now and how quickly it can be turned around, if you are willing to pay. I wish there were more regional places like PCBWay and JLCPCB in US, EU, etc (with similar pricing) so shipping didn't require circumnavigating the globe.

EU has Aisler but what you win in shipping times you lose in production lead time (unless you pay for faster service).

And there are probably others but with even less visibility / willingness to interact with private customers. Hell, I used to live next door to a sales office for a local PCB fab, but they never bothered to answer my inquiry about prototypes.

(That's another thing the proto-friendly companies do right: instant quotes without log-in requirement)

Re: Designing and assembling my first PCB

#36

Post by LoganDark »

stephen_g wrote: post #19
LoganDark wrote: post #16

I've been trying to make a PCB but it's just so annoying having to sift through pages and pages of listings in order to find each individual tiny component without minimum order quantities of hundreds or more. The process of finding each component is so tedious that I gave up. (I was using EasyEDA hoping it would be easy to find components I could actually order -- nope)

What kind of part? I use Octopart for a lot of things, like ICs (sometimes some variants are available in low quantities but others aren't and only in thousands). For stuff like passives it's usually easier to use Digi-Key or Mouser and you can filter by MOQ so you only see things that are available individually.

the most annoying was stuff like resistors or capacitors. They tended to have huge minimum order quantities, there were hundreds of results for any kind of query and most of them were always out of stock. I wanted to stick to JLCPCB's platform so that I could order the boards pre-populated, but I didn't want to be stuck ordering far more components than the board actually needs.

I always feel anger or something when I see some YouTuber say they easily made a board and ordered it pre-assembled from JLCPCB. They make it sound like it's so painless, but for me it's mostly searching through part listings trying to find one without a minimum order quantity of like 100, because there are no filters or sorts for that

Re: Designing and assembling my first PCB

#37

Post by radeeyate »

ge96 wrote: post #10
Retr0id wrote: post #2

It's incredible how cheap it is to get custom PCBs made at prototype scale these days, even ones with advanced features. It feels like we're living in a golden era of custom manufacturing.

It is unfortunate hope local companies like OSH Park get love too. The marketing of companies like JLC or pcbway whenever I post a hardware project on a website like Hackaday or Hackster always reach out to me to use em. Not that it would matter so many big makers on YT use em.

I can vouch for OSH Park. Wonderful company, nice people, and really good quality boards. Pads lift so much easier on the cheap Chinese boards that I think it alone makes it worth it to choose local manufacturers. The price is a bit steep for bigger boards but if you're working on a project that they are interested in, they provided financial support every so often. I've gotten a few boards sponsored by them!

Re: Designing and assembling my first PCB

#38

Post by jhogendorn »

LoganDark wrote: post #16

I've been trying to make a PCB but it's just so annoying having to sift through pages and pages of listings in order to find each individual tiny component without minimum order quantities of hundreds or more. The process of finding each component is so tedious that I gave up. (I was using EasyEDA hoping it would be easy to find components I could actually order -- nope)

So a lot of this goes away if you try to stick to jlcpcb basic parts from lcsc, and you sort of develop preferred components for things. Another trick is when in a category, for example angular hall sensors, once you have the key attributes like vin, smt, etc, sort by quantity desc to see what parts get heavily stocked, that tends to indicate what is popular in industry and likely to be a good generic fit. Out of the top 10-20 pick according to stock level against price. If youre ordering from jlc, look through lcsc and you can do pcba with them, or get the parts shipped with the pcbs. Otherwise digikey, mouser (good for connectors), farnell, rs etc, roughly in that order. You will quickly learn for a lot of components there are very standard parts everyone uses. Diodes, inductors for example. To some extent if your footprint is already in the jlcpcb library, its popular and use that. Ie theres 1 smd push button that is basic on jlc and has a footprint in kicad default library. Youd be a little crazy to use anything else. Make all your resistors and caps 0603 or 0402, jlc stocks those the most, vs spotty coverage in 0805 or 1206.

But you find each time you find something in a category, a hall sensors, an encoder, a capacitance sensor, gpio expander, adc, you just file that away as kind of solved and next time you hit that part first before finding alts. Over time you have to dig about less and less. But dont bother with things like resistors, caps, etc that are basic. Even mosfets, unless you have special needs the 3 main types jlc has as basic are fine. Dont get some odd package thats technically two mosfets in one, just put down two basic mosfets. And if you do need a more 'advanced' part, look what is on jlc's promo list atm. Theres very popular stm's for example that are prettymuch constantly on promo (promo is they have the part loaded in mid term for some big customer so you might as well piggyback. Means no loading fee. Adds up)

Llm's can be useful for sifting the sand. Narrowed it to like 30 options and still dont know whats the best pick? Export search as csv and ask your favourite stochastic parrot which part would work best for your application and why. Dont ask them for part numbers though, completely pointless.

Re: Designing and assembling my first PCB

#39

Post by amelius »

Retr0id wrote: post #2

It's incredible how cheap it is to get custom PCBs made at prototype scale these days, even ones with advanced features. It feels like we're living in a golden era of custom manufacturing.

Yeah golden days for PCBs especially now the golden days for home built PCs seem to be over.
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