Hi There are an ever increasing number of places that will do pretty good quick turn boards. The fact that you can get 4 layer 10x10 cm boards with 4/4 mil rules / 8 mil holes for < $20 each delivered in under two weeks amazes me.Yes that’s a 10 piece price. Yes it includes framed steel stencils. Not so long ago your cheapest option would have charged you $300 simply to set up the board (== minimum test charge). The two framed stencils would have cost more than the whole order does now.
Bob > On Jun 22, 2016, at 6:14 PM, Nick Sayer via time-nuts <[email protected]> > wrote: > > >> On Jun 22, 2016, at 1:33 PM, Mark Sims <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> The value, quality, and turn-around from all these places is amazing. In >> the olden days, one was paying $50 a square inch for a single prototype >> board with 4 week turn-around. >> > > Not to turn this into the “Four Yorkshireman” sketch, but in the olden days > (which by my reckoning were maybe only 10 years ago) there wasn’t reasonable > hobbyist access to PCB CAD software either - like EAGLE or Altium or KiCad or > the like. > > When I was a teenager (mid 80s) I tried making my own PCB with clad board, an > etch resist pen, that nasty brown acid and the smallest drill bit I could get > my hands on. This was a single-sided board - I had absolutely no way to line > up a two-sided design even if through-hole plating would have been an option > (of course, it wouldn’t have). No solder resist, no silk screen. > > It was a disaster. Even with a drill press I couldn’t line the DIP holes up > closely enough to mash a chip in without bending the leads to hell and gone. > > It was that - and seeing the arrival of surface mount - that convinced me at > the time that there was no future for hobbyist electronic design and > creation. I dove with both feet into a career in software engineering. > > I had no clue that all I had to do was wait 20 years. > > _______________________________________________ > time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] > To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts > and follow the instructions there. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
