Is this PCBWay challenging JLCPCB and EasyEDA? Looks like it. I welcome it, EasyEDA and the super slick integration with JLCPCB is a killer feature and the reason I use JLC exclusively for all my boards.
If this works well I might give PCBWay a try.
If this works well I might give PCBWay a try.
I do have the advantage of one lab back in college where a pro spent 90 minutes instructing a bunch of teenagers how to prepare Gerbers for a class project through Advanced Circuits, but beyond that I've had no problems sending files to OSH Park, JLC, PCBWay, Sunstone, or Advanced Circuits whether they were generated in Eagle, Kicad, or Altium.
Even at the low-margin providers like JLC and PCBway they still have a human look over your gerbers (and most provide web viewers for you to see what you've uploaded in those files) to make sure you're not going to order the inverse of your board, or make all your vias unplated, or swap your copper and silkscreen layers, or anything goofy like that. If you do screw up the design, that's on you and the tools won't help, but prices are dirt cheap and turnaround times are screaming fast these days, so it shouldn't be too bad.
I don't understand why newcomers find plotting to gerbers so intimidating.
As my eyes and coordination are not as good as they were hitting buy now and having fully assembled boards come back for basically the cost of the parts and the PCB was game changing for me.
I've only done low-volume hobbyist stuff, & prefer KiCad, but I can see that not having to fiddle with BOM/CPL would be a +1 to EasyEDA.
You could always have fully-assembled boards come back for basically the cost of the parts...as long as you were at quantity 10k units. Hooray for automation!
Their website is an atrocity but I guess that's fine.
I've been using them for the last few months and I have no complaints.
PCBway is among the better board fabs in the world - certainly in terms of customer service, and very hard to beat in terms of value for money. The fact that they get you quote and acceptance in under an hour (during US working hours!) is incredible.
American board fabs could learn a thing or two from PCBway. They set a very high standard in terms of service. I’m very impressed by it.
I wouldn’t send a server motherboard or a radar frontend design to them (for a multitude of reasons - ITAR controls likely forefront among them) but most circuit designs aren’t in that league of board design. Most are two to six layers and 300 or fewer parts placed.
PCBway does pretty superlative work serving that niche.
Spoken like someone who didn’t read the comment they’re replying to?
The person you’re replying to said PCBWay was good. Quoting that comment: “they seem to legitimately do a good job” “Quality is as good as you'd want and the price is reasonable.”
Last time I used them their process was so stone-aged that they couldn't do solder mask between the pins of a QFP-64 package
PCBWay less likely to run into issues with weird design features and parts specs, but they are slower and more expensive.
Elecrow also takes Gerber’s from EasyEDA.