Hacker News Reader

Comment by stephen_g | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, getting good quality circuit boards is so cheap and fast now that it's just not worth doing DIY ones in my opinion. Protoboard is good for one offs, but beyond that, having four layers so massively simplifies routing for anything moderately complicated, and you get proper solder mask, proper hole/via plating, proper coating (HASL, ENIG etc.)...

Not that a lot of that can't be done DIY, but to do really good quality boards at home you start to spend a lot more time refining manufacturing processes than actually doing electronics! That's fine if that's your jam, it's a valid hobby, but I'm much more interested in making more interesting projects!

View on HN

Ordering from china is inexpensive but it takes time. I can send a pdf to a local printing house in the evening, get the negatives around the noon while the PCB is drilled. Then etch and mask it in about 2 hours and solder all the vias in next 3 or 4. (I wasn't able to get reliable plating.) Overall one day to have a prototype ready.

Where are you getting this kind of turnaround? Is this in the US? I purchase a couple dozen protoboards a year and am constantly looking for US board houses, but they all have lot charges of at least $500 and take a couple days just to get a quote back.

I use OSHPark for prototyping. I don't know where they send the boards, but they hit a reasonable compromise between cheap & fast: $5/sq inch for 3 boards. The quoting is immediate on their website. I usually have boards back in a week after ordering from OSH Park.

For production quantities, I use JLCPcb (China) with Airborne for shipping (so it doesn't take a month to get here). Their quality is very good. Pay the extra $20 and get a stencil to make paste application easy. It's worth it. I think my last order of 50 board roughly 2.5x3.5" with a metal stencil came to about $70 total with an additional $30 for 3-5 day shipping via Airborne.

In Poland I can get a board or 3 in a week but it will be expensive (about $150-$200 for a small one), normal, cheap delivery time is about 3 weeks. China is even cheaper but takes 4-8 weeks.

That's why I made a lot of boards myself as described in my comment - I get film exposed at professional house that does it for offset printing, and this is pretty fast and cheap (about $3-$4). I pick it up myself. The rest is done with photosensitive 3M dry film and Chinese wet soldermask. Drilling on DIY CNC.

If you pay for fast delivery, a Chinese board can be in your hands within a week of ordering. Sure, it's not instant, but you can do something else in the mean time.

What I usually do in the mean time is.... revise the board.

Sometimes I get 4 revisions in the pipeline where 3 versions I haven't even received yet are already obsolete and go right from the mailbox to the trash.

Unless you want RF materials, or something other than G10/FR4. The cheap prices of aggregating everyone’s boards comes with the lowest common denominator of material.

Even the 4 layer board processes are not set up for good power integrity. They have a center core for layers 2 and 3, with 1 and 4 as foils. It ought to be two cores with prepreg between, giving the low impedance for internal power planes.

I remember a W1GHZ project from the 00s or maybe even the 90s where he eventually got hairpin filters for low microwave frequencies to work using cheap PCBs.

Generic fiberglass is NOT consistent across multiple mfgrs enough that you can spec it for mass production from any mfgr in any country at any time, you need the very low variation specified "RF PCB material" to mass produce precision untuned hairpin microwave filters.

HOWEVER, the cool part of the project was generic fiberglass is consistent enough across one mfgr over a short period of time, that you can characterize product X shipped from PCB house Y and then you can very consistently get boards at the proper resonant frequencies.

The meme was not overly successful in the amateur radio microwave community, sadly, but the project did work perfectly well at the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com