I totally get that it's a fun process (and back in the day made plenty of boards with toner transfer + sharpie cleanup + ferric chloride), but if there's an interest in better quality product, the commercial solutions are going to be lightyears better and designs meant for them are far easier for others to replicate.
Nowadays, The final result is always going to be manufactured by a PCB house. The primary motivation is (still) hobbyists' home experiments, but I guess it's not too uncommon for rapid prototyping and verification in the workplace, especially for RF stuff below 1 GHz. Often, you find yourself prototyping a component, and you've never used or designed around it before. To begin with, you need to give your design a try and see whether it works or not.
* The process needs to be fast, you want to see the feedback immediately, even waiting for 48-hours (many PCB houses offer this option) is a waste of time.
* It's highly possible that your design contains one or more logical and layout problems, you need the ability to do multiple iterations in a weekend.
* More and more state-of-art components are surface-mount, it's simply impossible to prototype many things without using a PCB. RF is another interesting example, a double-sided PCB is simply irreplaceable for even the most simple RF circuits. Above 1 GHz, it becomes tricky and it's better use a factory-made PCB.
That’s significant if it’s a hobby and you want to do a project in a weekend, or iterate over a design quickly.
Either way, even a 2 day turnaround would be too much for iterative prototyping or even testing out some ideas.
For my hobby stuff, I feel like even if the board fabrication were instantaneous it wouldn't affect my project start-to-finish time very much. The time designing boards, making mechanical bits, and developing software are dominant, and my hobby time comes in little bursts, often several days apart. It would also take me longer to design a board for home manufacture and to do the assembly, since my hypothetical home fab won't produce reference designators, solder mask, nor vias.
Anyway, I'm not meaning to talk down at folks making their own PCBs, but more wondering if there's some missing information or niche there.
edit : 2 working days, € 137
If I need double-sided boards I'll usually farm them out because it's an absolute faff. But if I need an really thin adapter to go from Wide SOP to Thin SOP (typically for replacing blown Flash chips), I'll make a board. When you ask a large PCB fab for anything that isn't 1.6mm thick FR4 white-on-green and standard stackup, the prices rocket. (because they have to stop the line, set up for your custom run, then switch back)
If I just need one board to fix one radio, I'll coat a piece of Pyralux laminate or paper-thin FR4 in photoresist, expose it, etch it and cut it out with scissors.
For quick-run -- I was involved with a theming/prop building group a few years ago. Last-minute unforeseen issues weren't uncommon, and you just had to roll with it. Being able to spin a bodge-board in a couple of hours can be all that's needed to snatch success from the jaws of failure.
actually most of the china fabs (PCBWAY, JLC, elecrow, allpcb etc) include most of these options in their "prototyping" offers now. some even have MATTE BLACK and controlled impedance at no extra cost. competition is fierce right now so it always pays to shop around (and not just using PCB shopper)
I would never be able to design anything if I had to wait hours or days between iterations, instead of minutes.
I do think the situation with 3D printing is a little more nuanced than the PCB discussion. Currently, not much gets manufactured using 3D printing. So, time spent on designing a 3D printed part will be time spent prototyping, whether you print it or pay someone else to. With PCBs; I imagine that there will usually be design compromises to enable home vs commercial manufacture. So, if there's a possibility of scaling up production, then the home route is going to involve some combination of a suboptimal design for commercial manufacture, and burned design time. I'd rather just aim my PCB design effort at being able to buy 10^x boards, then only order as many as I need.
To try an analogy: home PCB making seems to me like mechanical hobbyists making their own nuts and bolts. Sure, it's fun to know that you can do it, and on occasion it does make sense. But, I don't understand why there is so much interest in actually doing it, and refining the tooling/techniques to do so.
None of these options is really viable, and if I could make a PCB myself in half an hour for $1, I would jump on that.
You kind of can, depending how you amortize equipment costs. This is how I've been doing this and it seems to be a good tradeoff between low initial cost, low effort and hhigh efficiency.
Up front you'll need a) a laser printer (any old laserjet will do) b) a hacked paper laminator (to increase its temperature) c) an etching tank with an aquarium bubble pump for water circulation and an aquarium heater. You'll find most of these in any hackerspace.
Then, for each PCB you'll need wax paper (even glossy magazine paper works perfectly) and copper clad FR4. Print your mask (mirrored) on the paper, clean your copper board (with steel wool, then with acetone), transfer the mask using the laminator. Then etch it.
This gives you a one-sided, undrilled PCB with 6 mil traces [1]. Good enough for the occasional SMD breakout.
Once the design is proofed, can send to board house to make a first production run.