Author: Bob

There’s a new Eagle plug in that lets you easily get prices from PCBShopper for your board. You can download it from https://github.com/JeremyRuhland/pcbshopper. Thank you, Jeremy, for writing this!

We have a new banner on our web pages. The old one was a CGI rendering of a shopping cart on a printed circuit board. The new banner is a photograph of a shopping cart on a printed circuit board – there is no CGI.

Both banners are inspired by the July, 1977 cover of Byte magazine, a painting by Robert Tinney that showed a train chugging along on a printed circuit board.

BasicPCB.com is now included on our price comparison list. They provide prototype boards, made in the USA, at low prices. They ship the boards free via USPS Ground to US addresses. They do not ship outside the US, so PCBShopper users who are outside of the US will not see BasicPCB appear in the price results.

We’ve added new features to PCBShopper. You can now specify the minimum trace width and spacing, the minimum drill size, and gold fingers on your printed circuit board.

We are pleased that we are again able to get prices from Elecrow. They have rejoined our price comparison calculator.

Elecrow appears to have changed their web site, and PCBShopper is no longer able to get prices from them. We have disabled Elecrow in our price comparison calculator until the problem can be resolved.

Screaming Circuits has re-joined our PCB Assembly price comparison calculator. They had changed their web site about a month ago, which prevented us from getting prices. We’ve modified PCBShopper – with assistance from Screaming Circuits – to get them back on the list.

We’ve just added EasyEDA as our 27th printed circuit board manufacturer. EasyEDA’s free, web-based PCB CAD software has been on our free CAD page for a long time now, but we didn’t have them in our price comparison list because their on-line quote form was not usable by PCBShopper. EasyEDA solved this by writing an API for us to use, and we thank them for that.

We’ve been told that in Europe, millimeters are used more often than centimeters for specifying board sizes. So we have added mm as an option in our Units pull-down box.

We have removed Screaming Circuits from the PCB Assembly price comparison calculator. Screaming Circuits changed their quote form such that our existing code no longer worked. Their new quote form is … unusual. It may take us some time to figure out whether we can get prices from it.