On Mon, 2010-03-08 at 19:00 +0000, Robert Spanton wrote: > On Mon, 2010-03-08 at 13:30 -0500, Jim wrote: > > Are there any fab shops that would be gentle with a very new, very > > inexperienced PCB designer? OH and reasonable for a prototype. Last > > time I laid up a board I used a drafting table and mylar. I may need > > a bit of handholding as I go along. > > In my experience, most PCB manufacturers cope with "newbies" reasonably > well. Is it in their interest to do so! > > In the UK there's PCB Train: http://www.pcbtrain.co.uk/ They at least > have a web interface that'll immediately generate a quote for you, and > take design submissions through the website. A number of friends and > myself have used them fairly regularly. Their express service is > extremely useful and cheap!
> The one thing that you should make sure you're aware of is that paying > the extra for electrical test is going to be worth it. PCB Train will > sell (and I'm sure other manufacturers will too) you boards that haven't > been electrically tested, which I've been stung by in past. It's not > pleasant having to manually beep every via on a board with a > multi-meter! I just had some boards (through an assembler) from pcbtrain, and they somehow managed to short a pin with 20mil clearance! Unfortunately, it was a main power rail (typical), and I had to do a lot of searching (eventually bisecting by breaking tracks) to find the problem). My assembler assures me this was a complete one-off, and he's never had any problems with them before. -- Peter Clifton Electrical Engineering Division, Engineering Department, University of Cambridge, 9, JJ Thomson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0FA Tel: +44 (0)7729 980173 - (No signal in the lab!) Tel: +44 (0)1223 748328 - (Shared lab phone, ask for me) _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
