Ken YapMy attention was drawn to the NextPCB factory by a new customer offer where you only pay shipping on the first set of 5 or 10 boards in return for allowing them to put their logo on it. I decided to use them for #6 segment 2 digit LED display board and later #7 segment 2 digit LED display board to make 6 cm tall digits, and in the case of the former project, to have a custom font. Only 2 digits will fit into the bargain 100x100 mm limitation so I made the boards cascadable.
There isn't a lot to remark on their service and I mean this in a good way. Their web order page has the usual options. In this pandemic era, all shipping has been slowed. The first board took about 8 weeks to arrive and the second about 4 weeks. Part of the time they were sitting in the departure airport in China. In the first case I could see from the tracking it was moved from one airport to another, probably due to the shortage of flights. Of course if you pay more for courier service you can get faster delivery. But I'm cheap as the idea of paying more than few dollars per board for what are just my hobby projects irks me. So I'm willing to overlap projects and work on something else while waiting. The long wait time is also incentive to double check and triple check the design files before submission.
Here are a couple of close-ups of the boards I received, excuse my soldering:
Disclaimer: My boards are not complex, I'm still using THT for the most part so I didn't push the envelope. I do have some SMT pads on the front side that I didn't use and those came out ok too. Do your own qualification to find out if they can handle the precision you need.
What I liked about their work is that the solder on the pads were very easy to melt solder into. It has been a bit more difficult with boards from some fabs. There shouldn't be any difference as 60/40 solder should have the same melting point everywhere. Maybe I have a better iron tip now, who knows?
As for the logo it was simply the word NEXTPCB on the bottom right of my boards. Not annoying at all.
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I would like to help people by sharing my review, not sponsored from real industrial perspective.We produce thousands of pcba and wanted to try Next PCB to compare to Allpcb or pcbway.Worst EMS ever we tested, 2 months lost, weeks and weeks to deliver 5 pcb samples with 50% of components, we will finally finish it here internally.I can share customer number and pictures of PCB if you have some doubts.
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