Which PCB Fabrication / Manufacturer do you use?

I've used JLCPCB as they appear to be the best cost effective alternative. PCBNew offers better capabilities and still at an affordable price, but they are more expensive. I recently talked to some guy from PCBNew and they may offer me free or highly discounted fabrication, but I still haven't given them a try yet.

If I could make a suggestion, I would love to see a design challenge or competition that includes PCB fab. I suspect it wouldn't be that difficult to talk to some of these PCB fabs and get them to sponsor the PCB fab part (I've see PCBNew sponsoring many personal PCB projects). This would also give the companies quite a bit of visibility too. 

I've used JLCPCB as they appear to be the best cost effective alternative. PCBNew offers better capabilities and still at an affordable price, but they are more expensive. I recently talked to some guy from PCBNew and they may offer me free or highly discounted fabrication, but I still haven't given them a try yet.

If I could make a suggestion, I would love to see a design challenge or competition that includes PCB fab. I suspect it wouldn't be that difficult to talk to some of these PCB fabs and get them to sponsor the PCB fab part (I've see PCBNew sponsoring many personal PCB projects). This would also give the companies quite a bit of visibility too. 

That would be an interesting design challenge. PCBWAY does a lot of sponsorship as well. Including marketing/selling the PCBs for you if you want.

It would be really great if the contest resulted in element14 "branded" PCBs that could be handed out as "free" give-away items. At $0.50 each they would cost less than most freebies, and they could actually be useful.

I got the name wrong, I meant PCBWAY not PCBNEW. Yes, E14 PCBs would be interesting...

dougw said:

It would be really great if the contest resulted in element14 "branded" PCBs that could be handed out as "free" give-away items. At $0.50 each they would cost less than most freebies, and they could actually be useful.

I should whip out KiCAD and learn to design some... what footprints would it have?

Loads of footprints Chris, pretty much for anything.  It's also very easy to create your own.  I think Shabaz created a whole tutorial on using Kicad not so long ago which would be useful perusing.

The video version of it has been surprisingly popular although I don't consider myself a "youtuber". It was likely because there was a huge demand for Kicad 6. It contains the footprint information, and for the first month or two since Kicad 6 was released, I had to re-watch bits of it myself to be sure of how to do it. Now it's no problem.

Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Be7XOMmPQE

Blog links: /technologies/open-source-hardware/b/blog/posts/kicad-6-unofficial-quick-start-training-guide-video

/technologies/open-source-hardware/f/forum/50425/kicad-for-non-kicad-e-g-ex-eagle-enthusiasts---a-discussion

Incidentally I couldn't have picked up the learning as quickly as I did without community support.. I didn't know how to go about learning KiCAD, so I merely wrote a discussion post mentioning my intent and screenshots of my progress, and others filled in the gaps and provided tips/best practice etc. I think it was a neat way of learning, that was just discovered accidentally.

Just use https://easyeda.com/. It's kids play (I'm referring to standard version vs. the new pro edition, which I've not used) compared to the likes of KiCAD, which compared to all the other heavyweights is still quite easy to learn.

I have yet to work out why it's so involved, steps wise, to go from schematic design view to pcb design view in KiCAD, Altium, Eagle, etc. etc. compared to EasyCAD which takes one click to convert schematic to pcb format.

Andrew J said:

Loads of footprints Chris, pretty much for anything.

This sounds like one of those 'solder challenge boards' which I've always liked the look of, and some designs that are literally a ruler with the ability to solder parts to it. I wonder if you can get a surface mount spirit level?

shabaz said:

The video version of it has been surprisingly popular although I don't consider myself a "youtuber"

Thanks for the links! So valuable!

BigG said:

Just use https://easyeda.com/. It's kids play

I haven't seen this before, I admit part of what stops me using KiCAD at the moment is storage space on my computer, I had a brief stint trying Fritzing from concept to PCB design but a bug wiped my work D: however, I'm getting the inspiration to try something new with these great suggestions

A surface mount spirit level?  That would need exceptional soldering to ensure it was absolutely level once on the board!  Even the board would have to be perfectly level.  You can get screw down ones so I guess you could create a PCB with holes for the screws and then use shims to finagle.  I assume it was a throw-away comment really anyway   

The challenge boards are good if you view them as soldering practice and nothing else.  My experience of them has been (a) no instructions so you have to figure out what goes where; and (b) no real quality so hit and miss whether it will work once complete.  IIRC one of my very early posts on E14 was about practicing SMD soldering.