Olimex alternative for PCB manufacturing

[Anonymous]

As you probably know, Olimex is having capacity problems and has therefore
stopped taking orders for PCB's to be manufactured. As I needed some boards
made I decided to look into
alternatives.

I found this one:

http://store.iteadstudio.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=19_20

Apparently, their boards are manufactured in China. They're also dirt cheap,
cheaper even than Olimex, so I decided to give them a try. I got the boards
back about a week after them
being shipped from China. They confirmed my order about a week before they
were shipped so it took about a week for them to be manufactured. The boards
I got back were small (5cm x 5cm)
and double sided. I also noticed that I could have ordered even cheaper ones
($10 including S&H) if I had picked the green boards (I picked the more expensive
red boards by mistake). Since the Chinese have
longer working hours and less vacation time the boards were processed even
during the holiday season. The Bulgarians (Olimex) shut their factory for two
months during the summer and during the
Christmas holidays as well, so this is a real boon. Especially if you need
boards made during in the summertime.

I got 10 PCB's for about $18 including shipping and handling. Their site has
Eagle ULP and CAM scripts available which you can use to check your design
with their design rules and to produce
manufacturing files.

All in all, I'm pretty satisfied with these guys so I'll be ordering more boards
in the future. They even do multilayer boards and SMD stencils! In general
it's unusual to see Chinese
manufacturers do low-volume PCB production, but so far my experience has been
a happy one.

 

[TTman]

I've used them a couple of times and 100%

 

[Bill Martin]

As you probably know, Olimex is having capacity problems and has therefore
stopped taking orders for PCB's to be manufactured. As I needed some boards
made I decided to look into
alternatives.

I found this one:

http://store.iteadstudio.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=19_20

Apparently, their boards are manufactured in China. They're also dirt cheap,
cheaper even than Olimex, so I decided to give them a try. I got the boards
back about a week after them
being shipped from China. They confirmed my order about a week before they
were shipped so it took about a week for them to be manufactured. The boards
I got back were small (5cm x 5cm)
and double sided. I also noticed that I could have ordered even cheaper ones
($10 including S&H) if I had picked the green boards (I picked the more expensive
red boards by mistake). Since the Chinese have
longer working hours and less vacation time the boards were processed even
during the holiday season. The Bulgarians (Olimex) shut their factory for two
months during the summer and during the
Christmas holidays as well, so this is a real boon. Especially if you need
boards made during in the summertime.

I got 10 PCB's for about $18 including shipping and handling. Their site has
Eagle ULP and CAM scripts available which you can use to check your design
with their design rules and to produce
manufacturing files.

All in all, I'm pretty satisfied with these guys so I'll be ordering more boards
in the future. They even do multilayer boards and SMD stencils! In general
it's unusual to see Chinese
manufacturers do low-volume PCB production, but so far my experience has been
a happy one.

Are those time limited promotional prices? I see everything shows "sold
out" on this particular page...

 

[[email protected]]

If you're in the US, BatchPCB (https://www.batchpcb.com/) is good.  You
can use any size or shape of board (with minimum and maximum dimensions,
natch), they charge $2.50 per square inch plus $10 for the order.

I've had good luck with them.

Looks like your suggestion constrains you to specific sizes of board.

I think you can get any size and possibly shape you like, the sizes
are just maximum sizes and what you pay for, i.e. if your board fits
within 5x5 you pay for 5x5

I haven't used iteadstudio or seeedstudio (they seem similar)
but I've considered it many times, the prices are crazy, I haven't
found anywhere that will make one board for what they will make ten
boards for


-Lasse

 

[[email protected]]

That explains why we're back-ordered on their Ethernet adapters. We
cleaned Mouser out.

Their stuff looks pretty good. We hacked an Etnernet interface into an
existing controller by tapping into an FPGA expansion connector with
this adapter:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/53724080/TEM2/T934_1.JPG

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/53724080/TEM2/T934_2.JPG

The FPGA just blasts out UDP packets and trusts that someone cares.

you could have put the enc28j60 on the adapter board, the schematic is
very
simple https://www.olimex.com/Products/Modules/Ethernet/ENC28J60-H/resources/ENC28J60-sch.gif

if you can make a 25MHz in the FPGA you could skip the xtal too

but then again, if you look at ebay you can get enc28j60 boards for
~4$, that's less than on
ic cost at digikey


-Lasse

 

[[email protected]]

The customer hacked a ribbon cable from our board directly into the
Olimex pins and got that to work. So we elected to keep the Olimex
(chip, magnetics, xtal all done) and make the adapter board. If we
ever have supply problems from Olimex, it would be easy to do a board
with the enc28j60 and the rest of the parts.

Olimex makes a lot of interesting stuff.

indeed and sometimes they trigger others to start making stuff

I just saw sparkfun.com had 10 year anniversary, started with one guy
buying
a pic programmer from olimex and deciding to make it easier to get
olimex
stuff in the US so he started selling it, now it is 135 employees
selling
and building stuff


-Lasse

 

[Dave U. Random]

Sorry the link is wrong. This is the right one:

http://imall.iteadstudio.com/open-pcb/pcb-prototyping.html

 

[passerby]

responding to
http://www.electrondepot.com/electrodesign/olimex-alternative-for-pcb-manufacturing-668622-.htm

anonymous wrote:
I found this one:

http://store.iteadstudio.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=19_20

Apparently, their boards are manufactured in China. They're also dirt
cheap,
cheaper even than Olimex,
The boards I got back were small (5cm x 5cm)
and double sided. I also noticed that I could have ordered even cheaper
ones
($10 including S&H) if I had picked the green boards (I picked the
more
expensive
red boards by mistake).

Do you by chance know if Iteadstudio can make v-grooves for snapping smaller
PCBs apart? I need a bunch of tiny boards made (1/2"x1/2") and don't want to
populate each individually. Could not yet find a cheap manufacturer that can
do v-grooves. BatchPCB suggests putting a string of (almost) touching drill
holes alongside the separation but that means that some boards will look like
postage stamps on three sides. Looks like they can make the small boards but
they would charge at 1sq.in. minimum and mine is 1/4 of that, and besides I
cannot deal with them individually anyhow. Anyway, just wondering if you ever
came across v-grooves mentioned while ordering your boards.


By the way, end of January / beginning of February sounds like the worst time
of the year to be ordering PCBs due to the Lunar New Year in China. I don't
know if Olimex is really backed up quite as bad, but it may be because some
people cannot wait till the end of February and order from Bulgaria instead?

--

 

[Spehro Pefhany]

Do you by chance know if Iteadstudio can make v-grooves for snapping smaller
PCBs apart? I need a bunch of tiny boards made (1/2"x1/2") and don't want to
populate each individually. Could not yet find a cheap manufacturer that can
do v-grooves.

pcbcart will do v-groove

BatchPCB suggests putting a string of (almost) touching drill
holes alongside the separation but that means that some boards will look like
postage stamps on three sides. Looks like they can make the small boards but
they would charge at 1sq.in. minimum and mine is 1/4 of that, and besides I
cannot deal with them individually anyhow. Anyway, just wondering if you ever
came across v-grooves mentioned while ordering your boards.


By the way, end of January / beginning of February sounds like the worst time
of the year to be ordering PCBs due to the Lunar New Year in China. I don't
know if Olimex is really backed up quite as bad, but it may be because some
people cannot wait till the end of February and order from Bulgaria instead?

Lunar New Year/Golden week is around Feb 10 this year, so longer
delivery time orders are coming up against the deadline.

 

[Spehro Pefhany]

Or do this:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/53724080/PCBs/Break2.jpg

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/53724080/PCBs/OnBoard.jpg

aka "tab"

 

[passerby]

responding to
http://www.electrondepot.com/electrodesign/olimex-alternative-for-pcb-manufacturing-668622-.htm

pcbcart will do v-groove

Thanks, Spehro:

I've looked at their site ( http://www.pcbcart.com/ ) but, since nothing is
available before creating an account there, can you comment on their pricing?
Do they describe somewhere on the site how the grooves have to be defined?
I've done Gerber files for simple milling (through) but not for v-grooves (not
all the way through and a different end mill?). Regardless of who I pick,
there will have to be some learning experience on my part here. Cheers!

--

 

[Spehro Pefhany]

responding to
http://www.electrondepot.com/electrodesign/olimex-alternative-for-pcb-manufacturing-668622-.htm


Thanks, Spehro:

I've looked at their site ( http://www.pcbcart.com/ ) but, since nothing is
available before creating an account there, can you comment on their pricing?
Do they describe somewhere on the site how the grooves have to be defined?
I've done Gerber files for simple milling (through) but not for v-grooves (not
all the way through and a different end mill?). Regardless of who I pick,
there will have to be some learning experience on my part here. Cheers!

I think they're maybe not the cheapest but competitive. Lots of
options with mask colors and so on. They're kind of slow, IIRC.

The V-groove I've used has only been for rectangular boards, so for
that just define the edges the way you'd normally do (for example, use
the mechanical layer, or maybe you can get away with defining it on
the silk screen layer).

This might be useful:-

http://blogs.mentor.com/tom-hausherr/blog/tag/v-groove-scoring/

 

[passerby]

responding to
http://www.electrondepot.com/electrodesign/olimex-alternative-for-pcb-manufacturing-668622-.htm

speffSNIP wrote:


This might be useful:-

http://blogs.mentor.com/tom-hausherr/blog/tag/v-groove-scoring/

Thank you for the link! That's quite a bit to take in, actually. For one
thing, I never realized the groove is done on both sides of the board, so my
guess is that it needs to be defined twice then. I guess, I'm going to have to
heed his advice: "The PCB designer should collaborate with the PCB fabrication
shop..." Yeah, it does not seem like an "upload and get it accepted in 2
minutes" type of an option...

Cheers!


--

 

[[email protected]]

responding tohttp://www.electrondepot.com/electrodesign/olimex-alternative-for-pcb...





Thank you for the link! That's quite a bit to take in, actually. For one
thing, I never realized the groove is done on both sides of the board, somy
guess is that it needs to be defined twice then. I guess, I'm going to have to
heed his advice: "The PCB designer should collaborate with the PCB fabrication
shop..." Yeah, it does not seem like an "upload and get it accepted in 2
minutes" type of an option...

very few boards, that isn't just cut out to a shape, but needs to
panelized in some
way to make pcb house and manufacturing happy, are ..

-Lasse

 

[Spehro Pefhany]

Thank you for the link! That's quite a bit to take in, actually. For one
thing, I never realized the groove is done on both sides of the board, so my
guess is that it needs to be defined twice then. I guess, I'm going to have to
heed his advice: "The PCB designer should collaborate with the PCB fabrication
shop..." Yeah, it does not seem like an "upload and get it accepted in 2
minutes" type of an option...

Cheers!

Actually, I think that's kind of a CYA statement by Mentor-- you
should be able to do just that if it's just an outline of a
rectangular board. PCB makers do a fair bit of manipulation of the
files.

 

[Spehro Pefhany]

very few boards, that isn't just cut out to a shape, but needs to
panelized in some
way to make pcb house and manufacturing happy, are ..

-Lasse

RU google translate?

 

[[email protected]]

RU google translate?

Maybe my fingers and my brain aren't always fully connected, but I
don't think
I've gotten a Google implant just yet

-Lasse

 

[John Devereux]

Actually, I think that's kind of a CYA statement by Mentor-- you
should be able to do just that if it's just an outline of a
rectangular board. PCB makers do a fair bit of manipulation of the
files.

I just draw lines on the drill plot where I want the grooves, they sort
it out. It only got tricky when I was doing manual "breaking" of the
boards.

"I want the groove deep enough so I can break them easily without
stressing the parts, but not so deep they all fall apart during pick and
place"...

 

[Jasen Betts]

I've looked at their site ( http://www.pcbcart.com/ ) but, since nothing is
available before creating an account there, can you comment on their pricing?
Do they describe somewhere on the site how the grooves have to be defined?
I've done Gerber files for simple milling (through) but not for v-grooves (not
all the way through and a different end mill?). Regardless of who I pick,
there will have to be some learning experience on my part here. Cheers!

Sign up. It's free. They don't spam.

 

[[email protected]]

They could embedd tiny strips of cordite on inner layers.

Or just use a chain saw to separate them.