PCB shopper and alternatives

There is any easier alternatives to PCBshopper. Any that I can send Gerber bom and pós and it will automatically fill infos.
If not where can I found the infos that PCBshopper ask?

Is it your design or something somebody published?

Is an already existing and done Open Source Hardware?
Here is the link off project.

Kicad project in freeDSP-INFINITAS/SOURCES/KICAD at master · freeDSP/freeDSP-INFINITAS · GitHub
I build the pos by myself.

Ok, I wasn’t concerned about the license as trying to gauge your level of understanding.

As you know pcbshopper is a price comparison site, not a fabricator.

For the PCB, they do roughly the same calculations as the fabrication houses present in their order page, so the price is reasonably close to what you would pay, but sometimes there are special offers which may reduce the price of a particular house.

For PCB Assembly pcbshopper tries to estimate the assembly charge by the number of parts, the number of pads, etc. This information you have to get for yourself from the design.

However the assembly charge doesn’t include the setup charge and cost of the parts. For this you have to get a quote from the assembly house. Sometimes the parts you specify may not be available, and they might suggest a substitute manufacturer. Sometimes they just don’t stock it, and you have to buy it yourself and ship to them (and suffer all the hassles of shipping things to other countries). Sometimes the part is just unobtainium because of supply chain issues, and you have to change the design. There are many threads on forums asking for suggestions for substitutes for parts that are not available.

Then the situation is complicated by special offers by the houses where they give you a discount on the assembly charge, or volume discounts, etc.

So pcbshopper cannot give you all the costing you want. Your best bet is to contact each of the houses and ask them for quotes for making the design.

The BOM format is usually slightly different across assembly houses. The CPL (POS) file may need some massaging too. There are plugins or generators that adapt to the various houses. Some houses will take KiCad PCB files directly.

So it’s not as simple as sending design files, and getting the prototypes back by mail. We’re not at that stage yet.

How to get this information from design.

Short answer: count them.

Longer answer: number of parts you can count from the BOM, number of pads is the 2x the 2-pad components (resistors, capacitors, etc.) + 3x the 3-pad components (transistors, etc) + and so on. If you are not sure how to do this, ask the assembly house to do it, since you have to find out the cost of the parts too.

We can use Inspect, Board Statistics menu option to get some infos as i thing. After upgrade project to kicad 6 successfully. We can count fine pitch parts from bom in my case.
After that only need to count bga/qfn/lcc parts?

So the cheapest option to me is pcbgogo

There is at least one well known house that isn’t in the list compared by pcbshopper. Don’t assume that its coverage is comprehensive.

What is that house?
Pcbgogo can in my case assembly 1 PCB for 30 USD. Both sides and details on picture


.Obs 191 Nha parts isn’t true is just to validate that comparison.

I don’t want to advertise for them on a forum but if you put PCB assembly in a web search you will probably find that they have taken out ads with the search engine. They are usually near the top of the list of PCB making only maintained by pcbshopper.

I got some small boards only containing R C and Q, I supplied and soldered the IC myself, for about $2 each delivered qty 10.

This is a 3D preview which is close to what I received which doesn’t have the IC or TH resistors installed (I did those myself and also the TH resistors have to be tweaked). The boards work in limited testing. After I’ve done more testing I’ll publish the project on Hackaday.

All the assembly houses that I found are more expensive than that. So if you can write the name here is good tip

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