Author: Bob

We added Bittele as a PCB manufacturer less than two weeks ago. Today, we’ve added them to our PCB assembly list as well. Bittele has been very cooperative in modifying their on-line quote forms to meet PCBShopper’s needs, and we appreciate how easy it is to get pricing information from their site.

We have added our 26th manufacturer, Bittele, whose web site is 7pcb.com. Their headquarters are in Canada and their manufacturing is done in China.

We just added stencils to our price comparison options. If you’re working with surface mount devices, you can specify whether you want a stencil for one or both sides of your PCB. Not all PCB manufacturers offer stencils, but we’ll show you the ones that do and how much it will cost. The prices we show are for stencils without frames.

We’ve added a big new feature to PCBShopper: we now compare prices for PCB assembly! Currently, we check prices for five assemblers: Accutrace (PCB4U.com) Advanced Circuits (4PCB.com), PCB Assembly Express, PCBCART, and Screaming Circuits. When you go to PCBShopper’s main page, you’ll see a choice of tabs that let you switch between the Fabrication and Assembly calculators.

The prices we report do not include PCB fabrication or the price of components. Assembly is much more complicated than PCB manufacturing, but we hope our new price calculator will help you find a company to work with.

We just added a new feature to the price comparison. You may now enter the copper weight for your boards, anywhere from 1 oz (the default) to 6 oz. This weight applies to the outer layers only; the weight of the copper on inner layers remains at the manufacturer’s default, which is generally 1/2 oz or 1 oz.

You might have noticed that the “Total with shipping” column label used to have an asterisk next to it, which referenced a footnote that said that shipping costs were estimates. That wasn’t entirely true: some PCB manufacturers provide exact shipping costs to PCBShopper while some do not. Only in the latter case did PCBShopper estimate the shipping costs.

One of our users, Alex, suggested that we indicate which PCB manufacturers we show exact shipping costs for, and which we show estimated costs for. That was such a great idea, we kicked ourselves for not thinking of it. We have now implemented it. For some prices in the “Total with shipping” column, you will now see a “(est.)” which means that the shipping costs are estimates.

It’s just a little thing, but now, when you do a price search, PCBShopper automatically scrolls the top of the price results table into view.

Hobbyists typically (but not always) care about low prices. Professionals care much more about quality. We’ve added a feature for those professionals: the ability to search PCB manufacturers based on their quality certifications. You can narrow your search to those companies with ISO 9001 certification, IPC 600 certification, either certification, or both certifications. Just choose one of the options in the “Quality Certifications” field.

Of course, if you don’t require your PCB supplier to have certifications, you can specify that quality certifications are “Not Required”, and PCBShopper will do its search of all companies, just as it has up to now.

It appears that CY Industrial has solved its web site problems. We have re-enabled them in our price calculator.

CY Industrial, one of the PCB manufacturers we cover, seems to be having problems. Their web site is down and our e-mails to them bounced. We’ve removed them from our list, but we’ll check back periodically to see whether they’re back.