3 ms·

Where I see a tiny bit of room for competition against e.g. JLCPCB, especially for a US company, is in rapid low quantity PCB fab and assembly. The offshore fa

by mNovak 6y ago

Where I see a tiny bit of room for competition against e.g. JLCPCB, especially for a US company, is in rapid low quantity PCB fab and assembly. The offshore fabs are rapidly dropping prices for PCBA, which is great, but if your parts aren't in their stock, it'll take a 20+ days while they wait to get it shipped in. It's surprising they don't seem to have good distribution nearby, but as far as I can tell, JLC will actual import things in from Mouser or Digikey, only to turn them around to you 24hr later.

codebje 6y ago
I've used JLC for PCBA. They use LCSC for parts, and have a separate inventory. You can only get parts that LCSC stock assembled, which is a pain - I ordered and soldered a QFP-144 part myself because it's not in their list. But A$120 got me two partially assembled boards, in a few weeks, which isn't terrible at all. (I used EasyEDA for this design, to get better access to JLC's parts catalogue, but it was a worse overall experience than using KiCAD, and I still had to fix up some parts' rotation anyway.)
elcritch 6y ago
I just spent a few days researching this for a new work project. It's a toss-up. There's many dozens of PCBA companies in the US. Most are much more expensive than JLCPCB. To make matters worse the user interfaces on the majority of them are horrible. No thanks, I don't want to count the number of SMT pads for you because you can't hire a few software developers. There are a few PCBA vendors I found that have good user interfaces: macrofab.com, circuithubs.com, tempoautomation.com. Likely there are more but circuithubs.com has been my favorite so far on a good UI and reasonable price. They have a github inspired flow that I like. After searching, I still believe there's an unmet market in the US for a JLCPCB style PCBA vendor that has a in-house SMT parts library and can therefore offer a price that's 1/2 to 2/3 cheaper than other American PCBA vendors. If OSHPark offered it for example (select parts library they can place cheaply) they'd become my goto.

by mNovak 6y ago

codebje 6y ago

I've used JLC for PCBA. They use LCSC for parts, and have a separate inventory. You can only get parts that LCSC stock assembled, which is a pain - I ordered and soldered a QFP-144 part myself because it's not in their list. But A$120 got me two partially assembled boards, in a few weeks, which isn't terrible at all. (I used EasyEDA for this design, to get better access to JLC's parts catalogue, but it was a worse overall experience than using KiCAD, and I still had to fix up some parts' rotation anyway.)

elcritch 6y ago

I just spent a few days researching this for a new work project. It's a toss-up. There's many dozens of PCBA companies in the US. Most are much more expensive than JLCPCB. To make matters worse the user interfaces on the majority of them are horrible. No thanks, I don't want to count the number of SMT pads for you because you can't hire a few software developers. There are a few PCBA vendors I found that have good user interfaces: macrofab.com, circuithubs.com, tempoautomation.com. Likely there are more but circuithubs.com has been my favorite so far on a good UI and reasonable price. They have a github inspired flow that I like. After searching, I still believe there's an unmet market in the US for a JLCPCB style PCBA vendor that has a in-house SMT parts library and can therefore offer a price that's 1/2 to 2/3 cheaper than other American PCBA vendors. If OSHPark offered it for example (select parts library they can place cheaply) they'd become my goto.