[Lab] Price for PCB

[Justin Hornosty]

Bruce writes:

> I'm looking to have this:
>
> http://arduinoexplained.blogspot.ca/2012/12/dew-controllerhardware.html[1]
>
> turned in to a PCB.  Where should I go and any idea of a price?

I have done a couple boards from seeedstudio
http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/ it's $10 a 5x5cm and you get 10
copies.

They were pretty easy to deal with, my first PCB had a few errors and
they contacted me and in one case added some mounting holes I had messed
up.

Other place is http://www.hackvana.com/store/ I haven't ordered from
them myself but have heard good things. You can contact the guy on
#hackvana on freenode, the guy is happy to answer questions and I have
heard he accepts GEDA and KICAD projects directly which is neat. I'm not
sure how the pricing compares, but I had asked about stencil prices and
they were quite reasonable compared to the other big sites.

There are the other common ones.
- https://oshpark.com/ (their prices are similar to seeedstudio but you
only get 3 copies of a board and I don't think they are free shipping)

- http://dirtypcbs.com/ (they are limited to 5x5 and 10x10cm but one
  nice thing is they don't charge more for different pcb colors)

I contacted one guy on aliexpress (hqpcb) for some pricing - just picked
some random sizes and I was quoted:

> 2 layers(5cps):
> 15.00cm x 5.00cm: $14
> 10.00cm x 30.00cm:$21
> 40.00cm x 5.00cm:$18
> 15.00cm x 15.00cm:$19

> 4 layers(5cps):
> 15.00cm x 5.00cm: $51
> 10.00cm x 30.00cm:$72
> 40.00cm x 5.00cm:$64
> 15.00cm x 15.00cm:$65

I haven't actually ordered anything from this guy so I can't say much -
I was just getting a feel of the pricing.

My main advice is to just make sure you double and triple check your
design and don't be shy about silkscreen text - it doesn't cost anything more to
label every component! Makes assembly much much easier.

One thing you can do is print the PCB out on a piece of paper (to scale)
and make sure things line up and make sense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCG4daPvuVI This video is a lifesaver
for kicad (which I'm guessing is what you did the schematics on) They
really don't make it clear in the UI that the opengl mode exposes different
features.

good luck!

-jjrh