One off prototyping

I've made a few "custom" audio circuits for people that they have been pleased with. They were mostly built on Veroboard or blob board, but it's getting to the point now that if I'm going to keep up with demand for one-offs, the effort taken in hacking these things together on perf is starting to really cramp my style.

I'm pretty sure most of these circuits will work first time out, and I don't like messing with a soldering iron any more than I have to. I'm thinking it's going to be more cost-effective to just do the layout in CAD and get a board made, even for one-offs.

I mean it would obviously be cost effective if I price the one-off high enough, yeah. I'm just curious if anyone else makes custom designs and does this as a matter of course. Turn around time is also an issue, I remember I had a thing done by BatchPCB years ago and it took what felt like forever. Its not much help if I can't do the PCB design and get the single PCB in hand faster than I can hack it together on blob.

Reply to
bitrex
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OshPark is pretty quick, if you can keep things to two layers. It usually runs less than a week, although it can take up to a couple of weeks.

If you absolutely positively have to have it quick, there's quick-turn places like Sunstone (formerly PCB Express). It's way more $$$, but if you're paying yourself a decent wage you may find that it's less expensive than taking the time to do a quality job with Veroboard or whatever.

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Tim Wescott 
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Tim Wescott

Den fredag den 29. april 2016 kl. 00.15.41 UTC+2 skrev bitrex:

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put in size, quantity, delivery time, etc. and it'll give you list of prices from different companies

-Lasse

Reply to
Lasse Langwadt Christensen

When I was working in the Science Faculty electronics workshop at Nijmegen University I ended up going that way - we had an layout program which would run on my desk-top.

The big advantage of going straight to printed-circuit board is that the ci rcuit you put together is a lot more reliable than hand-wired stuff. This p robably doesn't matter for one-offs for audio, when the customer isn't goin g to probe the board, but development prototypes tended to need something f ixed every week or so.

If you are doing something where stray capacitances and inductances matter, the printed circuit approach is pretty much essential, as is also true if you want to take full advantage of surface mount components.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Thanks, will check out OshPark. 2 layers should be fine for what I'm doing..do they include silkscreen/mask as standard?

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Reply to
bitrex

You can get 5ea protos in 5 days from PCB Cart. They will quote cost on the site. No affiliation.

Reply to
John S

Yes, they do silk and mask and I believe the boards are ENIG (at least the 4 layer ones are). I believe the service has sped up a *lot* over the years, much of it being automated. I don't think it takes two weeks to get boards back anymore. Check the site. If you read every bit of it I believe *all* the info you could want is there. Looks like they have a 5 business day service for an extra $89. I guess the guy is making a few bucks on this these days.

The only downside is the funky purple color. The guy doing this worked very hard to get that from a combination of soldermask colors. A lot of the early boards were an even more funky shade of brown. Now you can immediately spot any board made by his service. That has pros and cons.

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Rick C
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rickman

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