RE: Getting Custom RP2040 Boards Produced and Assembled with KiCad, Part 2!

shabaz — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 01:46:59 GMT

I gave it a try! This is the minimal board with the additions I wanted. I uploaded the PCB files, and then at the bottom of the website clicked on PCB Assembly.

The website prompted me for the BoM and Component Positions files (which were auto-generated by KiCad by clicking on the icon that got installed with the Fabrication Toolkit plugin).

Then, I had to visually go over this rendering that the site created, to check all component positions and orientations were correct.

This was the costing for a quantity of 10 (which is excessive, really I should only try a few boards first, but worst case I'll manually do some rework on these boards if needed).

With tax and DHL shipping all included, it worked out to $214 total, which is £169, i.e. £16.90 per board.

RE: Getting Custom RP2040 Boards Produced and Assembled with KiCad, Part 2!

shabaz — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 17:21:09 GMT

I've updated the PCB at the RP2040 custom minimal board repository, so that is uses a surface-mount connector suggested by [mention:333884685f3541cfa8a54caa82a8c2f5:e9ed411860ed4f2ba0265705b8793d05] and it's simplified the USB data lines routing too.

I tried uploading the design to a usual PCB manufacturer, and it looks good.

Here's the costing for ten boards (add your shipping costs and tax on top of that).

Of course, this is just for informational purposes, I'm not going to order this specific board as-is, since it's a minimal design with no GPIO connected (apart from an LED!). It is up to the user to append their own circuitry, e.g. header pins if nothing else).

A couple of points regarding the online assembly service experience so far:

(1) It can happen that the PCB assembly manufacturer is unable to render some of the components in the 3D view. They were displayed with a checkerbox pattern. I believe that means the manufacturer will ckeck the layout manually, so instead I decided to change the component to one that was recognized. This was an annoying iterative process admittedly.

(2) Some components can appear with an offset or incorrect rotation. Rotations can be solved immediately by clicking an icon in the 3D view on the website (this is the simplest way but like me, some might prefer to go back and modify in their files), but if there is an offset, that's more long-winded. I had to move the component in the footprint editor (i.e. select all, then right-click and from the pop-up menu in KiCad go to Position->Move Exactly), which is really annoying since of course that means that the PCB needs to be modified because the component will move. For example, the USB connector was off the PCB by precisely 5 mm (I don't know why!). My original (0,0) position, i.e. origin of the component, was at the location shown with the red arrow. That position made sense to me, because it was the most important reference mechanically, it is where the connector ends. However, I had to move the component such that the origin was at the green arrow location, 5 mm inward. In practise, while this is feasible with the very simple board that I had, with a more complex board you definitely won't want to be doing this. You could edit the positions in the CSV file generated by the Fabrication Toolkit in KiCad, but then you'd need to remember to re-edit that, if you ever re-ran that toolkit. Probably best to make a checklist and add notes for such things for the specific board, so you don't forget.

One other observation, is that all this might seem like a lot of work to set up, and it really is. But then when I thought about it, manufacturing an entire board should rightly be expected to be a lot of work. Normally that's a whole team-worth of work (design engineers, PCB engineers, mechanical engineers, parts procurement and parts library management, and so on), so it's impressive a lot of that can be collapsed into an online ordering process, but you do still need to do an amount of work to get through it.

RE: Getting Custom RP2040 Boards Produced and Assembled with KiCad, Part 2!

geralds — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 18:35:42 GMT

Hi [mention:b0bc65b9ecdc4307bd967592f00e340a:e9ed411860ed4f2ba0265705b8793d05]

Wow! superb! They are very fine information's that I can use.

Please look I've answered and uploaded my Ki-Cad files in part 1.

Best Regards Gerald