Friday, March 29, 2013

PCB Ordering Time for my Remote Appliance Controller Project

So I finally managed to find the time to finish up the first prototype design up this project. If you want to know more what it's about read the previous posts below.

Anyways, I decided to go with sparkfun.com's BatchPCB service. I've heard only good things about it and it seems hard to beat the price so I figured I would give it a try. If you're unfamiliar with the outfit, it is a low cost prototype PCB service run my the famous Sparkfun. It costs $2.50 / sq. in. for a 2-layer board or $8 / sq. in. for 4-layer boards (plus a 1 time per order $10 setup fee). The way they manage to offer these low prices is by panelizing the different PCB designs that their customers submit and when a panel is full they send it off to a fab house that they do business with. The disadvantage is that your design will usually wait a little while until the panel fills up. However, it's hard to beat the prices for single quantities. My first board below only cost around $5! The second was was $20 because it is quite larger, but it's still quite a good deal.



I will post again when I receive the boards with pics and then hopefully soon after that I can start assembly and MCU program development.