Interesting, I see it’s cloud based, and they offer a fab service. They do allow free gerber export, which opens up any board house you prefer.
I have always been a bit skeptical about my designs being stored on someone else’s computer, but at the same time I have given in to f360 for cad/cam already. Not like anything I’ve designed would be of much commercial value anyways… but still.
Having them make and populate the boards is nice, that and it is very easy to share your designs.
JLC is usually pretty good on price, board wise. I’ve not used them for assembly, though.
For bare boards/stencils I’ve been using PCBway, but the two services are pretty close to identical for the most part.
The last half dozen small production runs I’ve done have been through a company called Shenzen 2 U, mostly because my account manager from another company moved there. Happy to forward the details or help with quoting if you’d like.
Yes as soon as we get a few testers out and it is time to make a bigger batch I will check the numbers.
I was told JLC was a bit less expensive in small quantities, PCB way is better for larger orders. The JLC files and part numbers transfer right over. I have not heard of Shenzen 2U but I will need to get a quote at some point in about a month I would guess.
One other thing is that it probably pays to start thinking about some design-for-manufacturability topics now.
I find that it helps a lot for me to write the testing steps for each section of a design as I’m doing the schematic work and then review it while I’m doing the layout. It’s almost the equivalent of a software unit-test.
Thinking about this early will mean you’re more likely to catch places that could use a test point or similar.
In my limited experience in board design (I only have one commercial board in the wild and a couple other in-house production parts) I’ve used advanced circuits. They are out of CO. They both fabricated the boards and populate them. While they may not be the cheapest up front, I have had very good customer service. They are worth a quote for your initial testing.
Is your intent to share your Easy EDA design at some point or just publish your gerbers for the open source part of this?
Both.
I do have some options from MRRF but I am willing to get more quotes.