Olimex alternative for PCB manufacturing

I've used them a couple of times and 100%

If you're in the US, BatchPCB

is good. You can use any size or shape of board (with minimum and maximum dimensions, natch), they charge $2.50 per square inch plus $10 for the order.

I've had good luck with them.

Looks like your suggestion constrains you to specific sizes of board.

--
My liberal friends think I'm a conservative kook. 
My conservative friends think I'm a liberal kook. 
Why am I not happy that they have found common ground? 

Tim Wescott, Communications, Control, Circuits & Software 
http://www.wescottdesign.com

expensive

boards

Are those time limited promotional prices? I see everything shows "sold out" on this particular page...

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I think you can get any size and possibly shape you like, the sizes are just maximum sizes and what you pay for, i.e. if your board fits within 5x5 you pay for 5x5

I haven't used iteadstudio or seeedstudio (they seem similar) but I've considered it many times, the prices are crazy, I haven't found anywhere that will make one board for what they will make ten boards for

-Lasse

expensive

That explains why we're back-ordered on their Ethernet adapters. We cleaned Mouser out.

Their stuff looks pretty good. We hacked an Etnernet interface into an existing controller by tapping into an FPGA expansion connector with this adapter:

The FPGA just blasts out UDP packets and trusts that someone cares.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com 

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom laser drivers and controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro   acquisition and simulation

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you could have put the enc28j60 on the adapter board, the schematic is very simple

s/ENC28J60-sch.gif

if you can make a 25MHz in the FPGA you could skip the xtal too

but then again, if you look at ebay you can get enc28j60 boards for ~4$, that's less than on ic cost at digikey

-Lasse

expensive

two

The customer hacked a ribbon cable from our board directly into the Olimex pins and got that to work. So we elected to keep the Olimex (chip, magnetics, xtal all done) and make the adapter board. If we ever have supply problems from Olimex, it would be easy to do a board with the enc28j60 and the rest of the parts.

Olimex makes a lot of interesting stuff.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com 

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom laser drivers and controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro   acquisition and simulation

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indeed and sometimes they trigger others to start making stuff

I just saw sparkfun.com had 10 year anniversary, started with one guy buying a pic programmer from olimex and deciding to make it easier to get olimex stuff in the US so he started selling it, now it is 135 employees selling and building stuff

-Lasse

On the site of BatchPCB is states that their boards are made in China as well. I wouldn't be surprised if they're made in the same factory. Let's face it, it would be impossible to make boards in the U.S. for this price.

You are not restricted to any size, just to maximum sizes for a specific price point. You do get 10 boards for the price, though, which is certainly more than what I used to get from Olimex.

Sorry the link is wrong. This is the right one:

Do you by chance know if Iteadstudio can make v-grooves for snapping smaller PCBs apart? I need a bunch of tiny boards made (1/2"x1/2") and don't want to populate each individually. Could not yet find a cheap manufacturer that can do v-grooves. BatchPCB suggests putting a string of (almost) touching drill holes alongside the separation but that means that some boards will look like postage stamps on three sides. Looks like they can make the small boards but they would charge at 1sq.in. minimum and mine is 1/4 of that, and besides I cannot deal with them individually anyhow. Anyway, just wondering if you ever came across v-grooves mentioned while ordering your boards.

By the way, end of January / beginning of February sounds like the worst time of the year to be ordering PCBs due to the Lunar New Year in China. I don't know if Olimex is really backed up quite as bad, but it may be because some people cannot wait till the end of February and order from Bulgaria instead?

Or do this:

--

John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc 
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com    

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom timing and laser controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer 
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

Thanks, John.

Yes, I will have to get creative with milling if I can't find who will make v-grooves. I was thinking about something like what you've shown but perhaps without internal milling. I've only done BatchPCB so far and they don't support internal milling but they say that you can "get very creative" with outlines. I think I'll end up with these jigsaw-puzzle looking outlines and will do 4-6 boards in one row to avoid internal milling.

I would still prefer the grooves because as I understand you had to file yours for smooth edges and I can't do that to a populated board - it will have a small flex PCB connector on it and I would be afraid filings will get inside. I will have to live with whatever edge is left after snapping them apart, so the cleaner it snaps, the better.

Thanks again for the suggestion!

pcbcart will do v-groove

Lunar New Year/Golden week is around Feb 10 this year, so longer delivery time orders are coming up against the deadline.

aka "tab"

Thanks, Spehro:

I've looked at their site (

) but, since nothing is available before creating an account there, can you comment on their pricing? Do they describe somewhere on the site how the grooves have to be defined? I've done Gerber files for simple milling (through) but not for v-grooves (not all the way through and a different end mill?). Regardless of who I pick, there will have to be some learning experience on my part here. Cheers!

A lot of board houses will do the groove thing, but the boards should be thin to snap off nicely. 32 mils or less works well. Snapping is easy (no tooling) and doesn't waste as much board as what we did. Snapping after stuffing can be interesting.

We just did one accumulated-various-circuits board, a bunch of test fixtures, filters, RJ45 breakout, a couple of LC filters, miscellaneous stuff that different people wanted. We'll just shear it up (before we load parts!)

We had one board house bitch about a similar layout "that's not one board, it's a bunch of boards" so somebody else fabbed it. We made the cut lines less obvious on this one.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com 

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom laser drivers and controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro   acquisition and simulation

I think they're maybe not the cheapest but competitive. Lots of options with mask colors and so on. They're kind of slow, IIRC.

The V-groove I've used has only been for rectangular boards, so for that just define the edges the way you'd normally do (for example, use the mechanical layer, or maybe you can get away with defining it on the silk screen layer).

This might be useful:-

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I think one of the places we use, use a tool to separate v-groove boards. I believe the board is placed on a narrow metal edge and then a wheel is run through the groove, similar to a big pizza cutter

never quite understood why the board houses bitch over multiple designs on a board I can see why they won't cut them apart and handle multiple different boards, but as long as they stay together they are just one board

-Lasse