31 Jan
2014
31 Jan
'14
12:58 a.m.
On Jan 30, 2014, at 5:17 PM, Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 3:58 PM, geneb <geneb at
deltasoft.com> wrote:
I just did a small board with PCB-pool. Nice people, modest cost. One interesting thing
they offered that I should have taken them up on but did not is a free solder stencil.
Instead I did the soldering by hand, with wire solder. I?m not doing that again, not at
0.5 mm lead pitch. Perhaps I should have used some of the liquid flux I have, but that?s
water-clean stuff rather than no-clean and I didn?t want to deal with that.
Next time I?ll know better.
paul
Well it IS an open source project, so you could
always have a set of boards
made here via Seeedstudio or Oshpark.
I have pretty good resources right here at the edge of town. I had a
design fabricated about 2 years ago - a 3"x3" AVR board for driving a
clock with 72 LEDs - $35 each (q. 100), PCB, components _and_
assembly, local PCB, local robotic assembly. Similar complexity and
part count to the SCSI2HD, which is why I said it would take a lot of
units to get the cost (not the price) below $30. Fortunately a big
chunk of the NRE cost is the solder stencil. That's expensive for 10
boards and noise-level for 500 boards. For 100 boards, it's a few
bucks each of the cost.
Yes, I can solder my own SMT parts. That's not a limiting factor.