Musical maniac Hal over at Milwaukee Makerspace told me about JLCPCB and suggested I try them out. Since I had a coupon due to signing up as a new customer, I ordered 100 boards and chose the free shipping option. The boards were ordered on July 21st and as of August 8th I’m still waiting for them. Since I’m getting 100 printed circuit boards for about 13 cents a piece, I’m okay waiting for them!)
Meanwhile, I had a project at work where I was trying to decide how to wire something and not create a messy rat’s nest of wires, so I decided a PCB would be the best solution. I whipped up a simple board in Fritzing (Yeah, I know… Fritzing is “garbage” except I know how to use it, can use it very fast, and it’s fine for simple boards.)
One tricky thing with this board was that the traces had to be pretty thin to route around the solder pads. I exported the files as SVGs and took a look, and it seemed good. Since I needed these for a work project, and I needed them fast, I chose the expensive shipping option. The 5 PCBs were $2.00 and the shipping via DHL was $16.81, so in total it was $18.81 for 5 boards that I got in about 4 days! Seriously… I uploaded the files on July 25th at 04:40 (GMT+8) and got them delivered July 29th at 14:31 (GMT-5).
The first thing I did was pull out a meter to check all the traces… all good! The board looks great. I soldered header pins into three rows and now I need to solder 48 wires onto it. Wheeeee! (Oh yeah, the board is plugged into a Mux Shield II.)