3 ms·
Unless you're building a stupid-simple board w/old-style through-hole components, give up on milling and just use an internet board house. (FWIW, Sunstone/PCBEx
by dublin 8y ago
Unless you're building a stupid-simple board w/old-style through-hole components, give up on milling and just use an internet board house. (FWIW, Sunstone/PCBExpress has done great boards for me.) Why? 1) Layers & plated vias: You want them, even if just for power and ground planes; 2) Solder Mask (really makes manual soldering easier, esp for fine pitch chips), and opaque solder mask can provide a little early IP obfuscation; 3) Silkscreen annotations, but most importantly, especially if doing Surface Mount components, 4) Solder paste stencils - if you're doing fine pitch surface mount you do want this! (Make sure your solder mask prevents bridging between adjacent pads!)
- dublin 8y agoAnd FWIW, I haven't used anything but Internet PCB shops for prototypes since 2001 - that's the point at which I needed surface mount, so I made the change, and never looked back. If you're really in a hurry, you can pay a bit more to expedite and get everything in a day or two (usually the stencil's the long pole in the tent...) We did two board spins a week for rapid development projects, without no problems - in 2002!