11 Mar
2010
11 Mar
'10
5:56 a.m.
On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 11:16 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
>> $ 200 is definitely even close to the
stratosphere.
>> Entertain yourself and get a quote for just the PCB.
>> (4Layer, gold fingers, 14 routing points, non standard thickness,
>> prototype amount 10, smt)
>> And while you're at it, put the qbus drivers on it and a handle.
>>
>> Please tell me what you got so far.
It's been a few years since I priced small runs of through-hole-heavy
Qbus boards, but our Qbus COMBOARD was 4 layer, had the usual amount
of gold fingers, and *bare* cost us $500 *each* in short runs. We put
our own handles on them. I still have the foot-powered rivet press
and (somewhere) bags of suitable rivets.
PCB manufacture is cheaper than it was when we started doing 4 and 6
layer boards, but that sort of price is why we stopped making certain
models of boards when the PCB stack ran out - too expensive to make a
short run and not enough customer demand for a large run.
?Indeed, SMT will be *cheaper* due to the reduced
number of holes to be
drilled. ?And much faster to assemble.
Recently, the 2-layer boards I've had made and priced had no surcharge
for hole quantity. I'm willing to concede that's not so for
multi-layer, but certainly SMT is convenient in many ways (more room
to route signals on the bottom for one).
I would personally not be fussy about SMT vs through-hole construction
- either would be fine if it kept the price down.
-ethan