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SparkFun will be closed on Tuesday, November 5th to support our team in being able to go out and vote! Orders placed after 2 pm MT Monday, November 4th will ship on Wednesday, November 6th. Thanks for your patience and understanding.
Class tonight! (Wednesday) Checkout our Eagle PCB layout class. Free to watch online! We should be online around 4:45PM MDT (mountain time) if you want to stop by and check it out.
Erik has been slaving away on the BatchPCB website. We've completely rebuilt the front, the back, and the middle. If you're looking for a low-cost PCB fab house, check out BatchPCB - it's getting easier to use every day.
The most recent feature we're pretty excited about is the ability to offer a PCB to the public. This means that you can layout a board, save it on the BatchPCB website, then make the design public. We're hoping this allows people to see what each other are working on - a little different way to discover and collaborate.
Hey, here's a crazy idea: Get the Octopart.com guys to make a public "Bill of Materials" project for all the parts on the board, that takes care of ordering everything. Hook that up with this.
You log in, place one order, and a week or so later boxes start showing up from Sparkfun, BatchPCB, Digi-Key, Jameco, etc. Instant virtual kits!
Not such a great deal. For a $5.00 joy stick PCB they charge $10.00 handling and thats not including shipping!.
Try and find somewhere cheaper than $15...
Well, considering we posted this PCB a few days ago :X
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=9110
Shoot! They sold out. Well the goal was to show that PCBs can be shared on BatchPCB. The Joystick breakout is popular enough that it became a product. Once that happens, the volume and price drop significantly (as with all things). BatchPCB is better for single/low qty.
For custom PCB's the price cannot be beaten
Thats great! Now, when someone posts a project online, they can link to the BatchPCB board so we don't have to convert the schematics ourselves! I'm so happy!
I can't wait to try this...
as a sugjestion. A rating system for PCB's that are designed would be nice.
Also a documentation airea so you know how to populate it with a schematic and kicad files because they are open source and everything can be retooled with larger circuit boards than the free version of eagle allows.
A way to set a percentage up to lets say 10% for the creator of the files to grow with sparkfun and promote the idea.
Great Feature,
And a symbolic percentage/(or author added price) would certainly be a nice addon
Good idea - we've been working on it since 'the beginning'. There are a multitude of problems actually pulling it off. Give us a bit more bit.
[A way to set a percentage up to lets say 10% for the creator of the files to grow with sparkfun and promote the idea.]
Ditto on this comment. I am not a big user of the BatchPCB service, but I think it is nice to make a little money with your hard work. Not sure if SFE is making any money from this service, but if they do, why not give the designer of the board a little profit too?
Don't get me wrong. I totally love the concept of community driven PCB development and I agree the price can't be beat. The thing that rubs me is an advertised price of $5.00 that cost $30+ to get to your door. Thats more then a 6X difference! And yes I know most of these costs are not under Batch's control.
The only feature BatchPCB lacks is a reasonable turn around time. God I hope there is a plan to improve this. My fear is that every time an order takes over a month to ship - fewer people will order, and orders will take longer to fill. On the other hand, if the turn was 10 days or so, more people who order, and the orders would fill sooner.
It seems like running partial orders for a time would quickly solve the problem.
This is AWESOME:) This could be an easy way to fill up the batches faster... more four layer designs == no getting rid of four layer deal;) And you don't even have to layout a board.
You guys should consider a indy/hobbyist friendly assembly program.
Will you be posting archived video of the Eagle PCB layout class? I clicked around your Ustream site, but didn't find it. I missed the live showing but would be interested in viewing late if possible.
check out http://www.ece101.com/category/tutorials/eagle/ They have a few eagle tutorials.
My screen was too small to see that there was a overlay box that came up, and I had no clue how to get rid of them image except by oing back, then forward again. The grey overlay dosnt change the already grey background enough to get the point across.
But... That being said. I love it and I want to recommend something.
Id love to be able to request deigns.
I think a PCB that takes the Li-Po batteries, and gives you 5v and 3.3v would be great. Easy enough, I have that going on a breadboard right now, but Im not versed in eagle.
Love the idea, dislike the implementation.
Consider using much less obtrusive javascript? I can't even figure out how someone would direct-link to a design, and back/forward navigation is not functional for browsing designs. Even worse, the site is entirely unusable with javascript disabled.
(This was pointed out on hackaday, but it seems that perhaps people wanted to spark about it without offering any constructive feedback.)
Great job, guys! I can't wait to produce a public-worthy version of my current project.
One thing I noticed is that the "view a larger version" interface isn't so intuitive. Viewing Nathan's PSP joystick breakout, there's a huge gap between the right side of the image and the vertical scrollbar--I didn't even notice it all the way over there, at first. It's also not obvious to me that I should click in the background to close the image. Perhaps a more "solid" looking window with an "X" to close would be more idiomatic.
I totally dig the concept, and it fits perfectly with one of my favourite things about SparkFun--the openness. Keep it up!
Excellent! Any chance of getting the trace width/spacing decreased to 5 or 6 mils for 2 layer boards? I've been trying to design a 80pin LQFP breakout board and the 8mils width/spacing is killing me. Even 7 mils might get me there. Any chance?
Nate,
You seem to have swapped your silk / soldermask layers for that board ;)
Leave it to the former BatchPCB guru to point that out. =)
Good to see you're still hanging around our little website here, David!
Hey David! Yep, it's just image generation. The gerber input is correct.
That happened to me too. It's a problem with the site. When I email them they said it was just with the images and should not effect the board.