Prototyping Surface Mount Components??

[Paul Burke]

people are basically lazy lol. and
lazy is fine, but let's not bullshit ourselves about it by hiding
behind the cost of the boards lol.

It's your choice: a couple or four hours work, with big inaccurate
holes, coarse or broken tracks, and the task of joining the two sides, a
bit of gardening between the 0.5mm pitch pads, an age debugging the
board, and a low PCB cost. Or 10 days wait and a board with the holes
drilled accurately, 0.3mm/ 6 mil rules, PTH, pads accurate, tinned,
knowing that the bugs are all your own, at a cost of a couple of hours
work at (cheap) engineer's rates, or say four hours at technician rates.
Maybe 10 hours at shelf- stacking rates.

Paul Burke

 

[Grant Edwards]

it is a good idea to factor in that while you're waiting on the
prototype boards to arrive in the mail you're sitting there "getting
paid" to do nothing.

You must be joking.

You've only got one project to work on? There's _nothing_
productive you can do while waiting for a board? That firmware
just writes itself, does it? Those old products all support
themselves? Documentation just appears out of nowhere?

Must be nice...

 

[Markus Zingg]

OR ... you need multi-layer boards and it might not even be feasible to

do those yourself. that is a valid argument to make.

I regularly do multilayer boards at home. Once you have a through
plaiting setup, this is relatively simple. As a rough estimation you
can say that you need a total processing time of one hour per layer.
So, a 4 layer takes 4 hours and so on.

Obviousely a through plating setup and a CNC drilling machine cost
some money, so for the average hobbyist this is not an option. I made
my own througplating machine and hence could save a lot of money I
otherwise would have to spend to buy one. Smaller CNC drills are
relatively cheap these days so at least for me it was worth the
investment.

Personally I think making your own boards is having a lot of
advantages apart from the prize argument only. But while we are
talking about prices, there comes a break even point with increased
complexity in that prototyping prices for multilayer boards
(especially those >6 layers) seem to rise exponentially. Another point
is the fact that even when I do my boards myself many kind of work can
be done unatended.

Elsewhere in this thread you mention also the time one has to wait up
until externally made boards arrive. This is a very valid argument and
the waiting time significantly varies depending on where you live. At
the risk of outin myself of not being perfect, this becomes a real
issue if you discover some sort of error or find some important
optimisation (i.e. because of space constraints etc.) once the board
arrives.

Just my 2¢ of course.

Markus