My friends and I are working on a railway automation project. Our seniors in college suggested us to do this final year project as it is a good topic. We researched and made the circuit design and have gathered some of the materials required. But we didn’t get the PCB board. We asked many of our friends and acquaintances but didn’t get the required sized PCB board. I was looking for good shops and stores in Toronto to buy it. I searched online and found many such shops. I saw many positive opinions about a PCB manufacturing company near to my area. We need only 1 PCB board. Is it a good choice to buy just 1 PCB board directly from a manufacturer? Or from a retail electronics shop. Please share your opinions.
What do you exactly need?
Ready to solder PCB, or raw PCB material for DIY processing (etching, drilling etc.)?
For ready to solder (fabricated PCB) it may turn out that it will be prohibitively expensive to have a one-off.
I’d suggest to look for a fab that is doing the “order pooling” service (they combine multiple projects onto a single huge PCB and manufuacture it this way).
For raw PCB material look for some electronics-oriented DIY shop.
I removed the link as it did not add anything to the discussion and kind of looked like an attempt to increase the search engine rank of the linked site.
I will closely watch this topic to avoid any spam.
Generally: talk to your supervisors. They might have contacts that allow you to get sponsored boards made for free or at least at a reduced cost (a lot of manufacturers offer such deals for universities or educational institutions in general)
Yes. I am just designing the PCB that I will order only one piece.
Local PCB manufacturer has a special ‘prototype offer’ for such cases. You pay 5 times less for production preparation then typically but you can’t order the same pcb once more without paying for preparation once more (in normal production offer you pay more for preparation but only once).