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We order printed circuit boards on aliexpress. Ordering printed circuit boards in China

In China. First, of course, I monitored prices from sellers on Aliexpress. There, the scheme is as follows: enter a query into the search bar, something like “PCB Prototyping”, select a seller with a more or less suitable rating from the list. The prices there are listed as $1 everywhere. Pay no attention to this. We found a seller, then on the page with the product look for his e-mail, and write that you need to make a board, in an amount, for example, 5 pieces, and indicate the main parameters. Board type - single/double-sided, mask - (color, most often green), contact coating - HASL, board thickness (1/1.2/1.6 mm), and board size in mm. Attach your .lay file to the letter and wait for a response from the seller. And then everything is simple - he sends you the price for your boards, you should go to his lot and purchase (for example, he set you the final amount of $ 30) - 30 boards for $ 1. In general, I wrote like this to 4 or 5 sellers, and each subsequent amount was lower than in the previous one. And then I accidentally stumbled upon the site itead.cc. There I was attracted by the fact that you can order boards up to 50 * 50mm, up to 50 * 100mm and up to 100 * 100mm at very nice prices. Here is more about the ordering mechanism and will be discussed in this article. So let's go to their website.

First of all, you need to register on it. The registration procedure is not complicated, the main thing is to fill in everything correctly.

Now that we have registered on the site, click on ALL CATEGORY, then hover over PRINTED CIRCUIT BOARD.

There, in the drop-down menu, the first item is PCB PROTOTYPING, and the second is SMALL BATCHES PCB. We choose the first one - PCB PROTOTYPING (we choose the second one if we order boards of a non-standard size). After selection, we see a window:


Choose right size based on the size of the original board. My board was just 5 * 5 cm, so the choice is obvious. Press ADD TO CART and a window immediately appears:

Here we select the parameters of our board. Moreover, the subparagraphs indicate what exactly is not included in the price of $ 9.90. For example, the thickness of the board is available 1/1.2/1.6 mm; if thinner or thicker is required, the price of the order will increase (the amount is indicated in the subparagraph).

Here is an example of filling without increasing the cost. For example, here the selected thickness is 1.2mm, coating is HASL, 100% electrical control, copper layer thickness 1 oz ~35 µm. Next comes Open Source And Get 2 More Additional Boards. If you answer Yes, then you allow the service to expose your fee to the public, but at the same time you will receive +2 fees for free. At the end, a quantity is selected. Do not confuse, this is not the number of boards, but the number of lots. If you choose 2, you will receive 20 boards. Next, click ADD TO CART, and then go to the cart.


Once again, check the correctness of filling and click PROCEED CHEKOUT. This is the payment process. The fact is that in this service you need to immediately pay for the order along with delivery, only after that it will appear in you in personal account where you can download the project files and put it into production. After clicking on PROCEED CHEKOUT you will be taken to a page consisting of 5 steps. There you will need to confirm the shipping address, select the shipping method, then the system will sum up the shipping amount and the amount of the fees and issue the final amount, pay via PayPal, with VISA cards or MASTERCARD. For example, for me, the cost of delivery by the China Post Registered Air Mail service was $ 4.61, that is, the final amount turned out to be $ 14.51. After making the payment, the payment is checked for some time and after that in your account (My Account tab), your order appears.

Now we need to add Gerber files. For a double-sided printed circuit board, these are: tracks top layer, tracks bottom layer, mask top layer, mask bottom layer, silkscreen top layer, silkscreen bottom layer, drill, and board outline. I have a board without silkscreen, so I did not add these 2 layers. We do the export, pack all the layers of the board into an archive, then click View Order. Next, we are looking for a window like this:
As you can see, in the Status tab I have Complete (completed). You will also have to hang there waiting for the file to be downloaded, click right there, you will open the explorer window, select your archive and click add. As soon as the board is loaded, a window will open in which there will be a drawing of your board, detailed specifications, which, if everything is fine, are marked with checkmarks, and if not, with crosses. I always marked with a cross was the contour layer. How many times I did not redo, constantly the contour layer was marked with a cross. So I did not understand what was the matter and sent it all like that. After downloading the file, you have about a day to change it, reload it, and so on. After that, the status will change to "In production" and this option will no longer be available. Approximately 4 days after placing the order, the status will change to “Preparing for shipment”, and then to “Completed”, while you will receive a tracking track, and it (track number) will also appear in the order itself. After 3 weeks, I had the boards. Below is an example of execution. Judge for yourself.







I usually made boards for myself using LUT technology. But in my latest projects, I ran into technological limitations. The need to manufacture at least a two-layer printed circuit board forced me to turn to an industrial fabrication service printed circuit boards.


Studying this issue on the Internet led me to the conclusion that it is most profitable to order the manufacture of printed circuit boards in China.

Recently, I managed to try the following services:

At the time of placing the order, allpcb turned out to have the most interesting offer (at the moment, prices could change, so we choose the service where the price is lower), since they had free shipping to Russia, when sent by Hong Kong Post.

Here you need to specify the characteristics of your future board.

  • Dimension: Board dimensions width, height.
  • Quantity: Quantity in pieces (minimum 5, but the price depends on the quantity).
  • Layer: Number of layers.
  • PCB Kinds: the number of boards on one PCB (usually, if you have several small PCBs, it is most profitable to place them on one PCB 100x100mm in size, separating them in a silkscreen layer, and then saw them yourself. Unfortunately, from allpcb.com given number I didn't pass. They counted my project as a few "PCB Kinds", which greatly increased the cost. Thus, for the allpcb case, I recommend limiting yourself to one board on one piece of textolite).
  • Thickness: Textolite thickness.
  • Min Spacing: Minimum spacing between components.
  • Min Hole Size: Minimum hole diameter
  • Solder Mask Color: The color of the protective mask. The default is green, but you can choose another one for an additional fee (seedstudio has it for free, but the quality of the green mask turned out to be noticeably better).
  • Silkscreen Color: Label color.
  • Surface Finishing: Surface finishing.
  • Via Process: Determine whether the vias will be masked or not (there is no point in setting this, since for gerber, by default, vias are processed according to the files).
  • Flying test: Testing tracks for breaks and shorts (free test).
  • Copper Weight: The thickness of the copper plating.

Thus, for amateur boards, it is enough to set the dimensions, the number of pieces, the number of layers. Leave everything else as default.

In total, the most profitable order option is a board 10x10cm in the amount of 10 pieces, double-sided, green mask. If we have one board (one type, you can place several, but one type), then it will be most profitable to place an order with allpcb.com. If you need to place several copies of the board on a piece of textolite, then it is better to use the www.elecrow.com service, their panelization turned out to be free.

You can learn more about the project itself and download the files of the project itself in the article

About automation for my brewery. I made a board using a photoresist, in principle everything works, but I want to move to a new level and decided to order a printed circuit board. If you order boards in Russia, then it comes out to about 250 rubles. for 1 piece from 10 pieces, and therefore turned to the Chinese "friends". There are many options, I contacted at least 10 people, they offered various services, up to the development of the board, but I chose the cheapest option ...
I used to make PCBs using programs:
- Sprint layout
- DipTrace
Both of them are simple, but not suitable for making boards, the Chinese advised several programs, but I didn’t like many, because. I didn’t find clear instructions on the net, but I settled on the Altium Designer program. The program turned out to be more complicated than the above, but the network is full of instructions and slowly I figured it out.
It turned out something like this (diagram and 3d model):


The Chinese ask for almost the same format with the ".pcb" extension, for those who are interested, here's the finished board.
I wrote to the seller in a chat, sent him a sample, he returned a screenshot of the finished board to me, but the first time I sent him a work with a Russian name and of course they are not displayed in the Chinese, I rewrote and sent it again, when he returned the screenshot, and everything suited me, he took the order and asked him to pay.
And 4-5 days after the payment, I receive a notification that the boards have been sent to the warehouse, and then, as usual, I form the parcel, pay for the delivery and wait for receipt ...
I ordered a few more parts for my controller, here's what came:


The first thing I liked was how the boards arrived, namely in vacuum packaging with bubble wrap bottom:


The seller promised to send 10 pieces, but in fact 12 came:


Everything is beautifully made and high quality:


You can find fault with only the silkscreen:


But the metallization of the holes is made at a high level:


Mask, through holes, everything is perfect:


Even the name of the board looks nice:


Everything is well done, even the contact tracks for SMD components:


They printed a little “our” on silkscreen:


In the light, too, everything is perfect:


When I was soldering, I decided to overheat the track on one board to find out if it would go away, but it wasn’t there, the track started to move away only when the board began to burn and stink strongly ... I’ll tell you, soldering such a board is just a pleasure!
Dimensions:


I took into account almost everything, but still, as they say: "the first pancake is lumpy." When I started to unsolder the elements, I realized that I placed the optocouplers on the wrong side, but this did not affect the operation of the device in any way and it turned out like this:


The case was already prepared for me, so I only had to flash the bootloader and upload the sketch to the arduino, I already wrote about how to do this in the last review.
This is how the old board “felt” in the case and how the new one became:


Of course, there is not much difference, but still it is, especially when I made the board myself, it was difficult to make through holes, for this I just soldered a thin wire, but sometimes I missed a break, of course there were no such problems with the new board.
The appearance of the controller remains the same:

Let me summarize:

+ Everything is done with high quality, from packaging to plating of holes
- You can find fault only with silk-screen printing
Conclusions: I decided for myself that better fee order in China, so that everything is done with high quality, rather than redo it several times due to overexposure in ferric chloride and other "jambs", the more the cost is comparable to the "raw" board, and here it is ready, beautiful and most importantly working ... I plan to buy +216 Add to favorites Liked the review +190 +380

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Why in China?...

Maybe not in China, just for several years I ordered printed circuit boards only in Russia. I won’t say that often, but I had to do it several times a year, and I tried it in different companies. I did not notice the difference, all the quality of printed circuit boards is decent. The prices are slightly different, but still a little expensive, especially when ordering a small batch. But what really annoyed me was the production time, even urgent orders, along with shipping, take more than three weeks from some companies, and a simple order takes 1.5-2 months. So I wanted to try to order in China. Although I admit that there are companies in Russia that I do not know about.

But in HQEW.net asked for extra money$ 4 6.16 (of which $16.16 for shipping), indicating as two orders and the more fees, the more expensive the delivery. I had to order only the main board ... it turned out $ 3 6.16 (of which $14.91 for shipping). Below is a photo of the board...

I tried it in another company in China, it seems to be even cheaper there, but there were problems with the order (they did not do it for me ...).

I send the order in the archive in the "gerber" format, this format is accepted by almost all manufacturers. How to prepare your project gerber on the example of the Sprint Layout program, you can read

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