11 Mar
2010
11 Mar
'10
4:19 p.m.
On Mar 11, 2010, at 12:02 AM, Dave McGuire wrote:
On Mar 11, 2010, at 12:56 AM, Ethan Dicks wrote:
It's a LOT cheaper now than it was then, and the price drops substantially when you
order a big pile of boards. For my last run of boards, qty. 1 pricing was about $35/ea,
qty. 25 was about $12.50/ea, and qty. 100 was less than six bucks.
And no (Guy!) I'm not talking about junk box parts, but I don't just up and
order everything from DigiKey either. I paid about ten dollars for over 5000 0.1uF 0805
bypass caps a year ago by buying partial reels. Smart shopping gets low-volume production
run quantities of parts very affordably, and they're pretty much always available.
Passives are not an issue. The assembly house supplies them as part of the assembly fee.
Even if they didn't, I'd pay them for it - I don't want to deal with parts
that I have a hard time seeing much less handling. FPGAs, level shifters (or more
appropriately 5v tolerant LVTTL transceivers), LVDO regulators, etc. cost $$s no matter
who you buy from (and I order from a lot of different suppliers). I also design using
readily available (ie in production) parts (the only exception are the unibus transceivers
and I go on the secondary market for those and typically can only buy in lots of
what's available...ie if somebody has 350 parts for $7/ea, that's what I get...yes
I have a lot of $'s tied up in various inventory).
TTFN - Guy
>> $
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.