Many of us here need pcb. I want to know why some of you refuse to buy pcb from a company.
Companies:
OSH Park
3PCB
OUR PCB
Baych PCB
PCBcart
Dirty PCB
Reasons:
Slow express
High price
Bad quality
Unprofessional workers
There are many others manufacturers, welcome your comments.
Looking forward to your replies. I want to do an investigation.
I don’t really understand what answer you are expecting? A review of each of these suppliers?
Professionals start with a recommandation from someone they know, ask for quotes and try the service.
Hobbyists look for the cheapest service, eventually taking shipping time into account.
And most people keep with the first service they try unless they are severely disappointed.
PCB price and feature comparison charts:
I want to have a detailed comparation of different manufacturers, advantages and disadvantages, in order to help others to choose a suitable manufacturer. I bought some pcbs from some of those pcb manufacturers, so i need your experiences.
Why don’t you share your experience first?
I flagged this as off-topic for KiCAD info forums… a forum first and foremost dedicated to KiCAD and it’s use and everything related.
If you want to do a pcb fab house or pcb order congregator review there are hundreds of blog platforms and other websites more suitable for that kind of thing.
If you have a problem with KiCAD and a certain fab house then you can state that and we try to help you.
Anything else is out of scope for KiCAD.info in my humble opinion.
This section should be about the issues that occur between KiCad software and the manufacturers eg Gerber and panellisation interpretation, pick and place etc.
I don’t think this forum is the right place to discuss commercial matters
Over the last 15 years or so I have dealt with at least half a dozen of the quick-turn prototype fabricators, for both hobby and commercial projects. All of these were fairly straightforward, two-sided boards. Although there were variations in “quality” (tolerances, precision, consistency, attention to details, etc) I never received any boards that were truly defective or unusable due to fabrication problems. (Layout errors are another story.)
Vendor selection was driven by price and delivery schedule. I believe it pays to shop around, but it was often difficult to perform an accurate comparison of one vendor over another. Pricing algorithms vary widely - a board which crosses the line into a higher-priced size category at one vendor may still qualify for a lower price at another. Be careful if hole sizes are truly critical (that’s seldom the case), since there are several methods of mapping the sizes on your drawing to the vendor’s standard drill sizes. Some features (e.g. solder mask colors, conductor plating materials, narrow trace/space dimensions, etc) are “standard” with one vendor but “extra cost” with another. Many vendors run gimmicky promotions that a particular job may, or may not, qualify for. (Delivery time in particular can be difficult to compare, especially when a quick delivery is used as a promotional feature. Submission cut-off times seem to always conspire with international time zones to add an additional day or two to delivery schedules. Some vendors count the day of order submission as “day 1” while others wait until the following day, and occasionally a vendor doesn’t start the clock until the order has been reviewed and approved by his internal production department.)
For larger orders - more than, say, 50 boards at a time - I was always at the mercy of company purchasing departments that worked from lists of approved vendors, and I seldom knew who the actual vendor was.
The original posting isn’t entirely out of line. A particular vendor’s ability to exploit some feature of KiCAD, or incompatibility with some other feature, is information worth presenting here. I recall a recent discussion where it was determined that a certain vendor didn’t support true circles as graphic objects, and circular shapes had to be created in KiCAD as an array of arcs.
Dale
Thank you for flagging this before I had a chance to see it.
Dale
@dchisholm - He spammed a couple of threads and has been terminated by me for the time being.