[sdiy] Good PCB Fab Experience

[David Moylan]

I just had my first experience using pcbfabexpress.com and it turned out 
well.  I was ordering 6 boards at ~15 sq. in. per board and their price 
for a masked/silked board was better than the next cheapest price I 
found even for a bare bones board.

There was zero human contact, everything was done by submitting a zip 
via the web and checking the status there.  That was a little worrying, 
but they showed up on time and look good.  They ship from California, so 
standard UPS shipping was overnight for me (in LA).

I did the layout in Geda PCB and though I hate the menu commands and 
could definitely make a list of suggestions (#1 being a list of recently 
used footprints), once I got the hang of it I was able to work pretty 
quickly.

I haven't soldered the boards yet, but my layout was really 
conservative. Everything's on 100 mil spacing, no paths between IC pins, 
etc., so I don't think there will be any issues except for layout 
mistakes I may have made; I wasn't working from a netlist.  The holes 
for the diodes seem pretty small, but that would be a PCB footprint 
issue not a fab issue.  If that does turn out to be a problem I'll make 
another post to let people know.

I used the PCB price comparison page that someone posted recently to 
hunt for the best price, so thanks for that.

Dave