rambo

Both ITead and Olimex announced on friday that they're shipping my order...

Ordered basically same design from both, mainly because I wasn't quite sure of 1. the speed of delivery and 2. the quality of ITead, Olimex can handle min 8mil (1mil one thousandth of an inch) trace/clearance, ITead min 6, so the boards I get from Olimex will need to have one jumper wire soldered.

ITead is of course dirt-cheap, Olimex is not horribly expensive (about 55EUR including shipping via FEDEX for one DSS [160x100mm], panelized and my individual boards cut to size).

I will see if I make more of these board, then I might get 4-layer ones (It's a RGB-led controller [3x16ch], with 2-layers I had to route the sub-colors in suboptimal way [basically each color is in two groups and I need to separate the wires coming rom the leds, with the 4-layer version each led has 3 pins so I could use servo connectors for example])

I will be publishing the schematics etc later (probably end of this month).

@rambo Very interesting. Do you use commercial or open source apps in your PCB layout designing process? It's good to hear about quality differences between these two alternatives...

I got used to Eagle when in the bad old times of nineties it was the only game in town and so far used the freeware version, last week bought a nonprofit license so I can do multilayer boards with it.

Kicad is reportedly rather good and is open source but I can't be bothered to learn to use it properly now, though I do have it installed on my Linux VM (also it seems it has much smaller component libraries so I would probably have to also spend time adding footprints and symbols for the components I need...).

Here is an article in Finnish from a guy who ordered a batch from iTead: http://www.ruuvipenkki.fi/2011/05/26/...

Fedex wins the speed race (I am jacks total lack of surprise) and the Olimex boards certainly look great (the Gold in ENIG-plating gives very nice finish :)

It'll be fun soldering all those tiny SMD parts.

The chinese boards came today, the HASL plating is a bit uneven (especially in large pads) but it shouldn't affect soldering much, testing that will have to wait until thursday though.

It is interesting to hear if you find big difference between these two when soldering...

I did try it yesterday since training got cancelled, there are variables I did not control for (like re-using old nozzle for the solder paste, not recommended but those nozzles cost money and I don't have too many to spare) but I had a bunch of difficulties.

Will try again today/tomorrow and see how it goes, but right now I have a feeling that if you actually need more than two boards or use expensive ICs that might not like multiple reflows take the ENIG surface from iTead too, even when it more than doubles the price it's still very reasonable at 2.5USD / board (for small boards) (the Olimex boards came to about 8EUR per board and that is VAT free since I routed the invoice through the family business [unless you order a huge bunch of other stuff at the same time the chinese boards are too cheap for customs to collect VAT, or even notice...]).

Good to know. Savings in a wrong place can cause problems / extra costs on a later phases...

With fresh nozzle and applying the paste to preheated boards (like I did with the Olimex boards) soldering was relatively easy, only had problems with the chips I recycled from the old revision boards (some bridged connections since they had leftover solder).

I'll post pictures later.

In short: I will be ordering again from these guys, still on the fence about ENIG plating, for small boards it doubles the price but for larger ones it still is the same extra price so it feels less expensive (of course these boards dirt cheap as they are so doubling the price really isn't a problem).

Ps. the Ruuvipenkki article has been updated.