Author: Bob

We’ve added the ability to specify silkscreens on PCBShopper. Some manufacturers offer silkscreen on both sides all the time, while others offer only top silkscreen, and still others charge more for silkscreens on the bottom – sometimes a lot more. Until now, the prices you saw on PCBShopper ignored those differences and simply presented the cheapest silkscreen option. Now, you can specify if you want silkscreens on the top, the bottom, both, or neither.

As with all the specifications on PCBShopper, you should not ask for more than you really want. If all you care about is the top silkscreen, don’t select “Both”; otherwise you’ll get fewer choices and more expensive choices.

We’ve just sped up the Price Calculator by fetching prices from multiple manufacturers simultaneously. Life is too short to spend it waiting for computers!

It used to be that if a manufacturer’s web site did not respond to our query for a price (e.g. the web site was down or just taking too long to respond) we gave no indication of it to you, the user.

Now, we show you a list of the manufacturers whose sites did not respond to us. Even better, we give you a Retry button to re-send queries to those manufacturers. If the problem with the manufacturer’s site was transient, we might get a price when we retry, and we’ll add it to the price comparison table.

We hope you find this useful.

We’ve added a major new feature to PCBShopper. You can now specify how quickly you want your boards to arrive.

Up until now, PCBShopper quoted prices based on the manufacturer’s default lead time (the time between when you submit your order and when the boards are manufactured), and it showed you multiple shipping options. But if you were in a rush to get your boards, there was no way for you to indicate that you were willing to pay more for shorter lead times. Now there is.

In the Printed Circuit Board Specs form, there is now a field labeled “Boards arrive in”. If you leave this set to “Default time”, PCBShopper behaves as it did before: it quotes prices for the manufacturer’s default lead time. But if you set it to a specific number of days (business days, actually), PCBShopper will quote shorter lead times and/or faster shipping. PCBShopper even figures out the cheapest way to get the boards to you on time, either by paying for faster shipping or paying for shorter lead times or a combination of the two.

Notice that you do not specify the lead time – it’s PCBShopper’s job to figure that out. Instead, you specify when you want the boards to arrive at your door.

As always, remember that PCBShopper’s shipping times and prices are estimates. If you’re on a firm schedule, double-check PCBShopper’s numbers with the manufacturer.

Up until now, we only calculated prices for Advanced Circuits (4PCB)’s barebones, $33/board, and $66/board services. That’s fine for prototype PCB orders, but not for large PCB orders. Also, the $33 and $66 services only offered green solder masks.

We now get prices from Advanced Circuits’ Standard and Custom services too. If you want a solder mask color other than green, you’ll see a big price increase in the quote from Advanced Circuits. That’s because, previously, we were showing you the price for green PCB boards. But you specified a color, which means you’re willing to pay more for it, and so we now quote you the price from the Custom service.

On the other hand, if you’re ordering a large number of printed circuit boards (more than roughly 10 or 20 boards, depending on the size) you will now see a lower price from Advanced Circuits, since their Standard Spec and Custom Spec quotes are better than their $33 or $66 deals when quantities get larger.

When we first started quoting prices for PCB Fab Express, we supported only their Bare Bones service, which has no solder mask on the boards. We now get quotes from their Standard service as well.

We’ve just added a big new feature for our non-US users. When you specify a country other than the US for shipping your boards, we’ll display prices in that country’s local currency! We also offer a drop-down box that lets you switch between seeing prices in your local currency or in US dollars.

We hope you like it.

Every now and then, we come across something that appeals to our retro-geek nature. We know there are others out there who also are nostalgic for electronics and computing the way it used to be (witness all the nixie tube clocks that are out there). Usually, the item we encounter is one-of-a-kind. But occasionally, there are more.

We’ve come across a small number of “IBM card” printing plates: cylindrical printing plates that were used to print the old punch cards. We’ve turned them into pencil holders and we’re offering them for sale in our new PCB Shopper Shop.

From time to time, we might offer other items there. For now, the pencil holder is the only thing we have.

We’ve posted an in-depth review of the new PCB CAD software, MultiSIM BLUE. Enjoy!

We’ve added a custom version of Target 3001! to our list of free PCB CAD software. This package has no limits on it, but can only output designs for PCB-POOL‘s manufacturing service. Once you have made your prototype boards at PCB-POOL, however, you can get the Gerbers and do your production anywhere you like.