PCB Prototyping Service?

[johnnyd]

I'm wondering if there's a good company out there that can turn prototypes around for less than $300 per part?

As my prototypes get smaller and more complex, I've felt the pain of doing a lot of soldering. I've been looking for a company that can do the prototyping for me.

The last six months I've been working on a project that has growing number of parts, a lot of LQFP pins, smaller and smaller SMD parts. There have been a lot of re-designs and each time, I feel more pain of multi-day builds and tests.

The pain of soldering these projects by hand pushed me to look for a company that could prototype the project.
I couldn't find a company that would cost something reasonable: most of the quotes were in the $500 to $1,000 per board range.

I was wondering if anyone knew of a company that was offering prototype assembly on the cheap. I can wait 8 days (I can wait longer), but the price of $750 per prototype is too expensive for me.

I was also wondering if anyone else had this problem and thoughts on how to solve it? I saw Sparkfun's Pit of Despair blog post a few months back and thought I might be sinking into that (http://www.sparkfun.com/news/909)

[hesai]

Post removed by Moderator

If a PM was sent there is no need to advertise publicly !

[tesla500]

Please don't remove advertisements in this case. I'm looking for something similar, and would appreciate it if posts about services/solutions would not be removed.

[deephaven]

Please don't remove advertisements in this case. I'm looking for something similar, and would appreciate it if posts about services/solutions would not be removed.

+1 Surely that censorship goes right against the ethos of this forum!

Itead Studio is really good value. I (and many other people round here) have used them several times. Prices are incredibly low.

[Simon]

The people have spoken, there is of course a difference between suggesting a company one has used and can recommend and a company that may be anything advertising itself, naturally this forum offers no endorsement to such companies who are having to resort to advertising at such a low level. We recently had a surge of PCB companies posting randomly to advertise themselves. The user is still a forum member and their post is still there so you can contact them.

[bombledmonk]

I'm not sure if they quite fit into your budget, but I regularly get emails from Advanced Assembly (aapcb).  I've talked to their people a couple of times, but never had an opportunity to personally need their services.  As I recall they seemed competitive for a US quick turn.

[ngfish]

Advanced Assembly is not too bad... a quoted $2-3k job turned out to be ~$1K through Advanced Assembly.  They also let us test the boards before soldering the entire order. And they picked up our order from Advanced Circuits saving on shipping costs from the fab house.

Others are Screaming Circuits and Advanced Circuits just started pick and place assembly.

[hammil]

If you don't care about shipping times, and don't really care about board quality, definitely go for iteadstudio ( http://imall.iteadstudio.com/open-pcb/pcb-prototyping.html ). $10 for 5cm by 5cm, 10 boards, reasonable design rules, but as Dave discovered, not always 100% within spec.

If you do care about the above, I'd recommend OHSPark ( http://oshpark.com/ ). It costs $5 per square inch, doubling the price of the equivalent itead board, you only get 3 boards, and they'll have a tab or two at each edge. However, the boards are of excellent quality. Gold flashing on the pads, nice purple soldermask, really sharp silkscreen and traces. Their support is also first class - not only is their interface really intuitive, if you make a mistake on your board,  they're only too happy to replace the gerbers for you, if they haven't yet sent it to the manufacturer of course. Lead time is 12 days, plus however long it takes to ship.

[free_electron]

He's looking for ASSEMBLY, not pcb manufacture ( bare board)

I use Kinetic Manufacturing Systems in San Jose.