I've been learning PCB design recently, and I'd like to point out that having the manufacturer do all the surface mount assembly can be surprisingly cheap and i

I've been learning PCB design recently, and I'd like to point out that having the manufacturer do all the surface mount assembly can be surprisingly cheap and it's not all that hard to do. I'm using Kicad and JLCPCB. Their minimum order is five boards, and if you're doing assembly the minimum is to have two of the five boards populated. There are some extra hoops to jump through. Kicad doesn't generate the BOM or placement file correctly so you have to edit some column titles in CSV files, and apparently Kicad uses a rotation standard where pin 1 is always in a certain orientation whereas JLCPCB uses a standard where the rotation is based on how it comes off the reel (or something like that), so you have to use JLCPCB's online editor to fix the rotations manually or let JLCPCB's people do it for you. It's aggravating, but I'd rather do that once than have to manually solder a bunch of boards -- especially if they have a lot of components. There might be some parts they don't have or they're not in stock, so you'd have to do those manually in any case.