Manufacturing PCBs for home tinkering
Years ago I wanted a digital weight scale for more than 30kg. It took me 5 years to get almost there but the result is not a hello world and is more reliable than many commercial models (most are crap).
When I designed my first PCBs, I didn't know where to order them. I asked around me and a coworker told me he was using Eurocircuits. Currently the lowest cost I can get from them is 57 EUR for a single 15mmx15mm PCB or 81 EUR for three. Ouch. Their market is complex PCBs quickly, not beginners' project with no actual deadline.
#DIY PCBs
Considering that one-off PCB oders are expensive and that I didn't want to wait for weeks for ones made in China, I started etching my own PCBs.
I didn't have much success with the toner transfer technique, I tried paint removed with a laser cutter and a variety of other techniques but they weren't very reliable or I wasn't experienced enough. Chemicals were annoying to deal with in a limited space: doable but with care and therefore annoying. And then I would still have to pierce holes. With all the setup and tear-down time required, this approach was only doable on week-ends and was going to be very time-consuming.
#Manufacturing, again
I found the contact of some guy in France who makes PCBs and mails them. They're quite inexpensive but the fabrication process is limited. A good experience overall though and it let me build confidence in what I was doing.
Unfortunately, people have holidays. When lead time jumped to one month due to Christmas and the corresponding order rush, I decided I should look around more.
#Profesional manufacturing and the switch to Aisler
At that point, I had basically three choices.
- China-based fabs like PCBWay, DirtyPCBs, JLCPCB, ...: inexpensive but long shipping and actually not so inexpensive if you want anything RoHS-compliant (lead-free among others)
- OSH Park (US): inexpensive but shipping to France took ages
-
Aisler (DE): inexpensive, fast shipping to France, accepts
.kicad_pcbfiles, good support
I've been using Aisler ever since, never had troubles, quite the contrary. There's an option at checkout for a donation to KiCad, which I always use and which I think is very appropriate.
I actually have little to say about it. It just works very well for my needs. The fact that the founder attends FOSDEM is just a bonus. There has been some more KiCad integration done recently, especially for KiCad 6, and I need to check that but I'm really looking towards having manufacturing rules being set automatically in the KiCad projects. That's the kind of nice things with using businesses that are oriented towards free software.