[KwartzLab] designing and manufacturing a PC board

[Alex Williams]

I don't really have anything new to add to this thread, except a +1 to what everyone else has said so far.
Eagle seems to be the hobbyist standard right now. I don't find it particularly easy to use, but there's lots of tutorials out there. Some caveats are that the free version is limited to 2 signal layers (not an issue for beginners) and 100 mm x 80 mm in size, which is probably large enough for most hobbyist projects.
gEDA and KiCAD are both free as in speech and beer, which is great, but have their UI quirks as well.
On manufacturing, OSH Park is reasonable at $5 per square inch for 3 boards, as long as you like purple. Batch PCB isn't bad either, at $2.50 per square inch for 1 board. Batch PCB, Seeed Studio, and Itead Studio all contract out the actual board manufacturing to Golden Phoenix, and they have pretty good quality. (Golden Phoenix won't talk to you unless you're trying to get a whole panel produced, unfortunately.)
But, naturally, I have to highly recommend the company that I work for, which is Upverter. We just rolled out a PCB editing and board manufacturing service which we're quite proud of, and I find our tools a lot easier to use than Eagle, gEDA, and KiCAD. It's all online so there's no software to install, and there's a modest collection of pre-built parts, and designs other people have made that you can fork and build on.
Alex
Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2012 19:58:13 -0500
From: james at jamesbastow.com
To: discuss at kwartzlab.ca
Subject: Re: [KwartzLab] designing and manufacturing a PC board

I'll second the recommendation for Seeedstudio, and also suggest Itead Studio. Pricing is very similar. I've used both. Quality is good. I wouldn't be surprised if they both use the same board house.

James

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 10:47 AM, Seth Hardy <shardy at asymptotic.ca> wrote:

seeedstudio is a+ for small runs of boards. cheap, pretty quick, good service.
also, i'd recommend kicad for pcb design - like eagle, but open source.


On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 8:33 AM, doug moen <doug at moens.org> wrote:

A friend of mine wants to design and manufacturer a PC board.

He's looking for suggestions for: electronics cad and pcb layout

program, and especially, which service do you recommend for

manufacturing the board? He just wants a single board manufactured,

with decent quality and through-hole plating.



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