[sdiy] making PCBs, what's your method?

[Colin f]

> I wonder about Olimex. In particular, whether they actually do make
> their own PCBs, or farm them out as when the demand requires. I have
> seen some very good boards from them, and I have seen some not so good
> boards. It was pretty clear that were not made by the same process, yet
> apparently came from the same company.

This happened with the first run of P3 boards I had made.
I had a quad eurocard prototype board done through the one-off service,
which was very, very good quality - easily a match for any other board I'd
seen.
I then placed an order for 20+ board sets. While the unit price was much
lower, and the quality was perfectly acceptable for the price, it was
nowhere near as nice as the one-off board. The solder mask was a darker,
matt finish, the shearing of the board edges was quite rough, and the
registration of the solder mask was a little off, making smaller pads
difficult to solder.
Also, they managed to miss out 2 of the 7 boards in the set, causing a long
and frustrating delay for customers while Olimex looked for, failed to find,
then made a new set of the missing boards.
The second run of boards were done by One Way Circuits, who actually worked
out slightly cheaper than Olimex (to be fair for a 50% bigger run).

Cheers,
Colin f



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