Announcements

We’ve added a new Chinese manufacturer to our price comparison list: PCBJOINT.

It was just a few days ago that we added Surface Finish (HASL, Lead-free HASL, ENIG, and Cheapest) to our board specs. Today we added one more option: Cheapest Lead-free. For many manufacturers, the cheapest finish is HASL, so if you need lead-free, choosing Cheapest would not give you the results you want. Choosing Lead-free HASL would not be the best either because some manufacturers don’t offer it, even though they have other lead-free finishes. In short, we needed a way to request the cheapest lead-free finish.

And now we have it.

PCBShopper’s price comparison page now allows you to specify three different surface finishes for your PCB: HASL, lead-free HASL, and ENIG. If you don’t care, you can also choose “Cheapest”, which selects the least expensive surface finish for each manufacturer (usually HASL or lead-free HASL).

Very often, you would like to fit multiple designs onto a board order. These are designs that you will cut apart yourself – the manufacturer does not need to cut a V-groove or drill a row of holes or cut a slot. Some manufacturers will allow this without charging extra, some will charge extra, and some will not allow it at all.

PCBShopper now lets you specify whether you will have multiple designs on the board, and will factor that into the price results. We can’t overemphasize this: the feature applies only to multiple designs that require no extra effort on the manufacturer’s part. If you want your designs separated by grooves, etc., that is another feature that PCBShopper does not, as yet, support.

We were having technical issues with Eurocircuits’ web site, so we removed them from our price comparison calculator several weeks ago. Those problems are now resolved and we’re happy to announce that Eurocircuits is back!

Eurocircuits is an important and well known European PCB manufacturer, so we’re pleased to include them in our list. We’d like to thank Wim at Eurocircuits for working with us to resolve the issues.

We’ve added a new PCB manufacturer, Omni Circuit Boards. They’re based in British Colombia, Canada. Currently, we only price prototype orders for them: 2 layers, green soldermask, top and bottom silkscreen, a maximum size of 12×12 inches, and shipping to the US or Canada only.

We’d like to thank Omni for the assistance they provided in calculating their prices.

We added a new, free PCB CAD package to our list: Solo PCB Design. It has no design limits imposed upon it, but it can only be used with a specific manufacturer. Currently, that manufacturer is Mass Design, but the software developer, FabStream, says that seven more manufacturers will be added soon.

Unfortunately, you must download the version of Solo tailored to one specific manufacturer. Also, it appears that if you create your design in one manufacturer’s version of Solo PCB Design, you can not open it in another manufacturer’s version of Solo PCB Design (according to the FAQs).

We’re making life a little easier for our non-US users. In the past, every visitor to PCBShopper’s PCB price comparison page would see the units set to inches and the shipping set to the United States. Now, we use the preferred language setting in your browser to guess at your location. If you’re not in the US, we’ll set the units to centimeters, and if we can identify your country, we set it as the shipping destination. Of course, if we guess wrong, you can change the settings as before.

We want to emphasize that that is all we do with your location information. We do not save it or track it in any way! We only use it to fill out the form. Also, we are using the information that all browsers send to all websites. This is not a new way of detecting your location.

We hope you find it convenient.

We sadly announce that we have removed Eurocircuits from our price comparison list.

We believe it is important to include PCB manufacturers from as many regions as possible, and Eurocircuits is a well known, important manufacturer in Europe. However, we have long had technical issues with accessing their site and fetching prices. We need Eurocircuits’ cooperation to resolve these issues, and our previous attempts to contact them failed.

If you know anyone who has influence at Eurocircuits, please ask them to contact us. Until then, we can not predict how long it will be until we return Eurocircuits to our price comparison table.

We’ve added a new Chinese manufacturer, PCBWay, to our price comparison.