davedarkoThis box is special :) A week ago this box with 10 PCBs of my Han Solo simple add-on arrived - fully assembled- at my place! I only had to program them to make them work, everything else was sponsored, populated and soldered by JLCPCB! Seeing these blue boxes in the hand of my post person always make me very happy. Most of you are probably aware of JLCPCB, but fun-fact - aparentlly so are 5.4 million users!
The PCBs inside came in a pink bubble wrap burrito, nothing was loose or able to scratch the important soldermask of this project. I never had to complain about packaging with them and I'm always using the boxes for project storage and carrying them to the hackspace and back.
And here they are. The back is populated with the ATTiny412, all resistors and capacitors, side glowing LEDs and two sockets, a JST-SH and a 2x3 header, as the regular IDC connector was too big for the design. JLCPCB offers a variety of colours that are great for pcbart, but in this case I was very pleased with the black PCB option already.
If you mark your PCB with JLCJLCJLCJLC and select "order number (select position)", then they will put the order number where you want - which is very important for badgeart like here!
Here are the color options for the standard and advanced FR4 PCBs.
If you have never used them before, now is the time - they even have coupons at the moment, up to $80 when you sign up. But there's always a coupon for something, as they usually have some for assembly or a new thing they are trying. Especially when you do a small run for prototypes, it really comes in handy that their prices start at $2 for 5 PCBs - and the quality is amazing.
That's not all they're doing though, they also 3D print things and offer CNC services, worth to check out! I definitely want to try out their flex PCBs as well in the future.
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Is there any specific reason you choose JLCPCB over PCBway? Just curious, as I'm trying to decide between which to use
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I'm using JLCPCB for a long time now, I've never compared them - I just never had a reason to I guess. It really depends on what you need in your project, most of the people would be happy with both services and will just look at the prices for their needs and go with the less expensive one.
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This is a powerful endorsement! I haven't paid for commercial PCB assembly in a few years and it's good to know there are more (and cheaper, and easier-to-use) players in the game. Will give them a try next time I need a batch fabbed up.
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Nice one Dave, yes their service is awesome. There are some neat features I've used. You can prepurchase parts and keep them in your library, very useful when stock is low.
For odd parts (or where you need something like genuine Molex connectors for high current) you can consign in fron places like digikey.cn - all works like a charm. They assign an lcsc part number and you update your bom.
For basic parts I have some old auto generated kicad libraries for passives at https://github.com/TomKeddie/prj-kicad-jlcpcb/tree/main/libraries - the uodate scripts don't work as they stopped publishing the csv. It was great to have their parts library in an sqlite database too.
Thanks for the post.
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