From Idea to Printed Circuit Board in One Week | Hacker News Reader

From Idea to Printed Circuit Board in One Week

patchr.io

52 pointsmooreds50 comments

In 2021, I would not recommend using proprietary EDA software and locking yourself into a single board house.

For most purposes, you can use the free KiCad EDA package ( https://kicad.org/ ) combined with a standard PCB vendor like OSH Park ( https://oshpark.com/#services ) or JLCPCB ( https://jlcpcb.com/ )

If you need boards urgently, OSH Park offers a quick turn 2-layer service, JLCPCB offers expedited service and shipping, or you can check a service like PCBShopper to view multiple PCB providers: https://pcbshopper.com/

It's not a good idea to lock yourself and your designs into proprietary systems when the alternatives are cheaper and, in the case of KiCAD, almost certainly superior.

It's always good to have more options, but I'd want to see Patchr.io become more transparent (please show pricing without forcing me to create an account first). I'm also highly skeptical of any proprietary EDA software that advertises a 30-day free trial in the era of KiCAD. KiCAD isn't at the level of professional EDA tools yet, but it's more than capable for most designs.

Unfortunately if you want some features you have to go proprietary, e.g. signal integrity, thermals etc.

It would be a fun project for some enterprising student's thesis project (open source signal integrity, for kicad, that is). I'm curious what CERN use considering they use KiCAD

Altium probably has the best UX of the EDAs on the market right now, but it's all stuck in one glorious thread! The just search and drag flow for symbols is a huge boon

You can survive without, just.

For thermals you can create an equivalent electrical circuit and use SPICE. For power integrity you can mostly make do by cascading s-parameters and there is an Excel sheet floating around somewhere that'll give you s-parameters for a rectangular plane with two arbitrary connections. High-speed serial signal integrity is a bit harder, I will admit.

Can you elaborate on the cascading s-parameters bit?

Sure, let’s say you have an s-parameter network that represents a PCB. You have 10 ports, 1 for the DC-DC converter, one for an ASIC and 8 for capacitors.

You take s-parameter models of the capacitors from the vendor (Murata, AVX, etc) and tie off the ports of the main network to make a 2-parameter network.

With a 2-parameter network you can now calculate the equivalence impedance (which is a function of frequency) and plot it or do a spice simulation with ngspice.

scikit-rf is one tool that can load touchstone files and perform these kinds of transformations.

Thanks! Seems like something that could be added to KiCad, well, if I could decipher the API.

> Altium probably has the best UX of the EDAs on the market right now

It may be best, but I'm not sure I would call it good.

Right now I have been splitting my PCB designs between KiCAD and Altium. Once KiCAD 6 releases, I'll probably go all in on KiCAD.

I simply am tired of the fact that my EDA tooling always sucks in so many ways. And now EDA vendors are all incentivized to "monetize" me instead of fixing their damn bugs.

At least with KiCAD, I can fix the suckage or pay someone to fix the suckage.

Make no mistake, Altium is still shit.

Also, Altium if you're reading this, send me emails about why I should use the software rather than just a price tag and begging.

That's a really badly designed page. There is no:

- pricing info for EDA

- calculator for the board manufacturing

- about/contact us page

- info to where you deliver in 1 week (without any about page, it's not even possible to deduce to which country your service might be limited to)

Copyright info shows 2019, either could have been overlooked or the project could have been abandoned. But having updated year info doesn't necessarily mean active project as well, as auto-incrementing copyright year info is very easy.

The pricing is extremely non-competitive: $4/sq inch for a single copy. For my last PCB order (230mm x 145mm), JLCPCB was $67.18 for 10 boards, ordered on 2021-02-18 and delivered on 2021-02-23.

Patchr is quoting this for 7 day production time for a single board:

    Price Estimate: $206.80

    * Not including tax

    * Not including shipping

Agreed. Hostile site also - even after selecting "order your pcbs" and creating an account, it won't provide pricing without uploading gerbers.

My last JLCPC order was $2 + $4.84 shipping for 5 pieces (82x54mm) and was delivered in a few days. I live nearby, but it wouldn't have been much more to send to the US.

To me this seems like a web-based reinterpretation (perhaps/probably accidental) of the quite old German "Sprint Layout" piece of software (https://www.electronic-software-shop.com/lng/en/electronic-s...) - there are probably some more tools doing this.

I like the simplicity of this concept, basically, don't bother to make a circuit diagram, only focus on drawing the PCB itself.

First impressions of using this beta:

I created a project based on the example PCB.

- My first instinct was to drag a component a little bit to see if the routes were updated automatically. It got stuck in "processing" for a long time.

- Ctrl-R is overloaded - instead of refreshing the tab when it's stuck "processing", it rotates the currently selected component.

- How to change routes wasn't immediately obvious.

I do think the creator would do well to have a close look at what made Sprint Layout so easy to learn.

There's a lot of negativity here, and I think I understand where it's coming from. A lot of you sound like you do this sort of work for a living. I am getting into small electronic projects in my limited free time.

Things I care about: * Board fabrication AND final assembly * Quick turnaround time * Small minimum order size (preferably 1) * Help choosing components

Things I DON'T care about: * Getting the absolute cheapest price * Being locked into a vendor for a particular project * Tight tolerances on things like thermal management or AC signal integrity.

I just want to have a custom board for my PIC-based project, or my one-off guitar pedal circuit.

I haven't tried this service, but I will. If anyone knows of other similar services, I would love to hear about them as well.

The web interface of the chinese fab houses directly is way better than what these guys offer.

For example JLPCB https://cart.jlcpcb.com/quote?fromDemo=yes You first order is $10 including parts and assembly for 5 boards with 4 day turn (1 for pcb fab, 3 for assembly). Typically the boards I have done (comparable to complexity to an arduino) are about $20 for 5 copies including fab and assembly. They also have a free cad tool called easyEDA https://easyeda.com/ but I would really recommend kicad. It takes like 5 clicks to go from layout in kicad to boards at jlpcb https://support.jlcpcb.com/article/44-how-to-export-kicad-pc...

PCBway has a lot more capability, but is a bit more expensive https://www.pcbway.com/orderonline.aspx

There's a bunch of them. Companies like this one have been offering free basic Windows design tools locked into their service for about 20 years now. I think they are where unsuccessful "value EDA" software goes to die.

I used ExpressPCB for a small project back when all these tools were very expensive and there weren't any good free ones. I found it very easy to use.

If I did not have professional tools available today, I would use KiCAD or TinyCAD + FreePCB and pick my board vendor independently.

I was resigned to start the nth project to make a "simple but powerful enough" PCB design tool when I had a second, more indepth look at JLPCB's EasyEDA tool and realized I could actually work it without getting frustrated. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EasyEDA)

Yes, it's PRC-based, but it's free to use and outputs portable Gerber files. For my hobby (or small-scale commercial) projects it will be fine.

KiCAD is really quite good and surely good enough that you’d be better off trying and proving that wouldn’t work for you before starting another one.

It has an easy path to Gerber output for PCB manufacturing and a slightly more involved path to JLCPCB PBC manufacturing and SMD assembly.

Starting cold (but with some Eagle experience years ago), I downloaded KiCAD and completed a simple breakout board in a single evening for family Halloween costumes. Ordered them on a Tuesday and had them the next Monday for around $30 for 10 boards.

> but with some Eagle experience years ago

These tools share these very peculiar UX conventions. The fact that you once learned Eagle primed you.

True, which is why I mentioned it, but I was “beyond incompetent” at Eagle and always gave up before finishing even a single design, so while I knew the basics of how PCBs got designed and made, my first commercial PCB ordered was that one and I found KiCAD notably easier.

This is true. But having used both I find Kicad I am constantly saying "ah...what a good way to fix that annoying thing eagle does". Workflow is way better IMHO in Kicad.

Second that. I had limited experience with Eagle and just jumped into Kicad and was amazed at how much easier it was to use. So much less painful. Hotkeys are well defined and logical. Libraries are miles ahead and things like making new footprints is very easy. Ability to add logos and pictures to silk (or copper) easily. A few years ago Kicad was "a decent competitor" and now I believe they are actually way further along than that. Maybe some people who used other tools like Altium can chime in but from what I saw Kicad is amazing...and seems to have a very active dev community. Anyone looking to get into Kicad I recommend watching some of the very well done tutorials on Youtube (I watched "Phil's lab" and "contextual electronics" tutorials in my case).

Chris Gammell’s (Contextual Electonics and KiCon organizer) “Getting to Blinky”[0] is really excellent and my go-to recommendation.

It’s not updated to the latest KiCAD, but it’s still very useful.

[0] - https://youtu.be/BVhWh3AsXQs

That was the one :)

On Phil's lab I watched "KiCad STM32 + USB + Buck Converter PCB Design and JLCPCB Assembly" which is even more in depth and longer...but it missed some tricks which Contextual Electronics had (such as drawing one wire through components in a voltage divider to link all of them).

I recommend watching both...and probably more.

I tried KiCAD, but having used Altium for 26 years, I’m sticking with Altium. KiCAD could not do simple things like assign nets to arbitrary polygons, which is critical for RF layouts. The DRC was really lacking too.

Of course it’s probably great for an open source project, but I don’t know anyone using it professionally. We have 20 Altium license at work, and I have one at home for my consulting business. Even at $2k/year maintenance, that’s cheap compared to the other RF software I use.

The whole problem with free CAD software is you’ll never get the cross discipline skills needed to develop it without paying someone. For example you need an expert at electromagnetics AND scientific programming AND UI design, etc. That’s a full time job, not a hobby. There is a ton of domain specific knowledge.

Yeah...I suspect in certain use cases (especially RF and such) this is a huge difference.

I feel some OS projects though do have the required skillsets and contributors who donate the time to make software worthwhile without payment and I have witnessed people put everything into it as if it was a job...but I do agree it is very easy to put off doing a suggested modification or "trivial to function of the software" type of work when you are not being paid to do so.

Kicad and Freecad have come a very long way in the last couple years from what I see...even with the shortcomings they might still have.

I certainly see them as a Fusion360/Eagle competitor.

I was a big KiCAD fan, until they dropped the autorouter. I had a board I'd designed that was routed with the autorouter, and I wanted to add a resistor. Couldn't do that. Grrr.

"Oh, you should route your board manually" I hear from KiCAD fans. No.

In my quest for a usable PCB design tool easily usable autorouting was a clear requirement - I mean, I had been reading about them since the 80s in electronics mags.

The autorouter in EasyEDA worked quite well for me when testing it. I was able to get it running within a few minutes without spending many hours watching youtube videos.

There is freerouting which interfaces to KiCAD. (It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s also not void.)

https://freerouting.org/freerouting/using-with-kicad

Not quite. [1]

It's become weird. Freerouting apparently isn't repeatable. Run it twice, get a different layout. Ouch. There are lots of forks and tutorials of varying degrees of obsolescence.

[1] https://hackaday.io/page/6082-using-freerouting-with-kicad-5

I don't see any reason to think that auto-routing must/should be deterministic. Auto-routing to me means "I don't care about some detailed aspects of the layout; just make it work with the constraints I gave."

I'm just fine with KiCAD itself, my real difficulty with it comes from importing component footprints and symbols. In most of the other eCAD packages, you can click a button, type a part number and download the symbol/footprint in-app.

In KiCAD, I haven't found any easy way to go about it, you always have to download a ZIP file, extract it, point KiCAD to the new symbol library, point KiCAD to the new footprints and match the footprints to the symbols.

Is there any better way of handling this?

Maybe SnapEDA and their new KiCad plugin [1] would be a good fit for you? I've not used the plugin myself but I do use SnapEDA footprints myself occasionally. I also try and keep on top of all the footprints available on GitHub and add them to our repo [2], you can add this globally and search through it from within KiCad.

1: https://blog.snapeda.com/2020/09/09/introducing-the-snapeda-...

2: https://github.com/kitspace/kicad_footprints

I've ordered boards made with Eagle, KiCAD, and EasyEDA. I'd recommend KiCAD of that list, but the first board I did with it suffered from the bad defaults for mask distances, and none of the fine pitch parts had mask between pins.

It's only a mistake one makes once but having defaults set for 1980s fab capabilities is annoying.

I agree with you, but I don't think I have ever had an EDA tool (proprietary or open source) come with useful defaults. Something has always bitten me.

I normally always run a really simple board through a new process or tool for exactly that reason.

Horizon is developing a good reputation. I haven't tried it yet (I'm a daily Altium user) but keep meaning to give it a whirl.

https://github.com/horizon-eda/horizon

What's the price for the EDA? Can I download my designs or is it cloud only?

One of the first PCB designs I did was with some proprietary software like this that was tied to a fabrication company. It was the easiest route at the time to getting something "done", since all the proper PCB design packages required a lot more work.

Yes it worked, but for the second project I wanted to do some things outside of their capabilities and other PCB fab houses were fractions of the price. So I had to basically start from scratch again and learn KiCad, wishing I had just gone that route from the start and not wasted time and money.

Now I'm pretty "OK" with KiCad and just finished a large board with about 1000 components that I sent to a fab house for pick-and-place assembly. I was able to shop the design around and pick the fab house I wanted to work with after talking with them directly and sending them industry-standard GERBER files generated directly from KiCad. Excellent.

So I guess my long-winded advice is to bite the bullet and learn a real PCB design program.

Where I see a tiny bit of room for competition against e.g. JLCPCB, especially for a US company, is in rapid low quantity PCB fab and assembly.

The offshore fabs are rapidly dropping prices for PCBA, which is great, but if your parts aren't in their stock, it'll take a 20+ days while they wait to get it shipped in. It's surprising they don't seem to have good distribution nearby, but as far as I can tell, JLC will actual import things in from Mouser or Digikey, only to turn them around to you 24hr later.

I've used JLC for PCBA. They use LCSC for parts, and have a separate inventory. You can only get parts that LCSC stock assembled, which is a pain - I ordered and soldered a QFP-144 part myself because it's not in their list.

But A$120 got me two partially assembled boards, in a few weeks, which isn't terrible at all.

(I used EasyEDA for this design, to get better access to JLC's parts catalogue, but it was a worse overall experience than using KiCAD, and I still had to fix up some parts' rotation anyway.)

I just spent a few days researching this for a new work project. It's a toss-up.

There's many dozens of PCBA companies in the US. Most are much more expensive than JLCPCB. To make matters worse the user interfaces on the majority of them are horrible. No thanks, I don't want to count the number of SMT pads for you because you can't hire a few software developers.

There are a few PCBA vendors I found that have good user interfaces: macrofab.com, circuithubs.com, tempoautomation.com. Likely there are more but circuithubs.com has been my favorite so far on a good UI and reasonable price. They have a github inspired flow that I like.

After searching, I still believe there's an unmet market in the US for a JLCPCB style PCBA vendor that has a in-house SMT parts library and can therefore offer a price that's 1/2 to 2/3 cheaper than other American PCBA vendors. If OSHPark offered it for example (select parts library they can place cheaply) they'd become my goto.

Does this service do things like carbon conductive ink? Been designing a gamepad board but haven't found many easy pcb sites that list conductive ink.

Lots of experts here so...: How do I get started with a tool like this? Is there a good community to join? Start with adafruit?

(Asking for my 8 year old)

They're very evasive about pricing. There are many online PCB fab houses, and they compete on price. There's no pricing link on the home page. If you look at the terms of service, there's a link to pricing.[1] It's a bad link.

[1] https://patchr.io/pricing

This seems to be a US based company, and none of the US based fab houses compete on price. Many don't even want your business if you're in the "Idea to PCB in One Week" prototyping phase.

The vast majority still want you to email them a zip file with your gerbers and wait for them to manually respond a day later with a quote that explicitly ignores half of the specs/requirements/quantities that you asked for in your original email.

Meanwhile, many of the Chinese houses have automated online workflows for both PCB fab and SMT assembly, and competent human sales / technical support that responds within the hour, and often do a much better job than their (arrogant, dismissive, careless, lazy) US counterparts, despite the language barrier.

A few US based companies that do well on overall experience (but not price) are OSH Park, CircuitHub, and MacroFab.

My experience is very similar in Europe - most places want you to send gerber files manually, and you are rewarded with higher costs and slower turn-around than getting PCBs shipped from China. Recently I actually managed to get a set of boards with SMT assembly shipped from China faster than bare boards from Germany, somehow.

How do those places stay in business? Military contracts? Highly specialised boards (e.g. 8+ layers, exotic substrates)? Companies paranoid about IP protection?

This looks great! Are the designs portable? Do I get Gerber files,etc?

They say "In-house manufacturing", where exactly is that?

Why is this better than Kicad and printing at eg JLCPCB?

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