Author: Bob

We’ve added a new free CAD package, MultiSIM BLUE, to our list of free CAD software. MultiSIM BLUE is a collaboration between Mouser, one of the major sources of electronics components, and National Instruments, maker of MultiSIM. MultiSIM BLUE appears to have no limits on it – it can handle up to 64 layers and any size board. It’s integrated with Mouser’s parts catalog and ordering system, so it’s easiest to buy the components you need from Mouser but of course you’re still free to buy them from any other vendor. It looks like a great new option for free PCB CAD.

UPDATE: Read our in-depth review of MultiSIM BLUE. It’s not as good as we thought it was going to be.

Sunstone’s ValueProto service is targeted to North America, but their web page doesn’t give shipping information for Canada or Mexico. Because of this, we have been QuickTurn prices instead for users outside of the U.S. Since QuickTurn can be much more expensive than ValueProto, we no longer do that. For orders that are small enough to use the ValueProto service, but which are to be shipped to Canada or Mexico, we now show the ValueProto price along with a note to contact Sunstone for shipping costs.

ITEAD Studio is offering special prices on its small-batch orders. We have adjusted PCBShopper’s calculator to account for them.

An important manufacturer, Eurocircuits, is now included in PCBShopper’s price comparison. They’re a well known European manufacturer and they have a partnership with the Europe-based electronics magazine, Elektor.

One of our users (thanks, Sid!) alerted us to a deal offered by Accutrace PCB4U. On their Purchase Order form for prototype orders, they let you double your board quantity at half price. A clever way to take advantage of this is, for example, if you want 30 boards, order 15 and then take the half price deal for another 15. This deal saves you money even if you’re ordering as few as 16 boards (the minimum prototype order is 10 boards, but it’s cheaper to order 10 boards and get 10 more at half price than it is to buy 16 boards at full price).

So we’ve incorporated this deal into our Accutrace results, and we include a note telling you how to get the price. We hope we’ll save you some money!

Maker Studio is the latest addition to our price comparison calculator. Their web site only shows prices for 2 layer, 10×10 cm boards, 10 pieces, so that’s all we show. If we don’t know a manufacturer’s prices, we obviously can’t show them.

We just stumbled across another free CAD program called PCBWeb. It includes a feature to order your PCB from a choice of manufacturers and can also create a Bill of Materials (BOM) usable at Digi-Key’s web site to order parts. That sounds convenient (and our guess is that’s how the software publisher will make money). The one down-side we can see is that PCBWeb does not appear to do auto-routing. Nonetheless, we’ve added it to our list of free CAD software.

I’d like to thank the staff at Sunstone Circuits for helping me troubleshoot the problems I was having querying their site for prices. The problems have been fixed, and Sunstone and now included in the price comparisons.

In response to a user request, we’ve modified the PCB price calculator so that it automatically sorts by price. Of course, once the table is filled with the results, you can re-sort it any way you want by clicking on the column headers, but the initial order will be by price, which is probably what you want.

We love getting suggestions from users. If you have any ideas, please send them to us via the Contact page. We’re very responsive.

Electronics Lab has an interesting offer: they will make your PCBs for free! There is a catch, of course. You need to make your design open-source and post it to their web site. It looks as if they’ll review your project’s documentation before they green-light the free boards.

There are other limitations too: your board must be one or two layers and no bigger then 10×15 cm. If you’re OK with all this, they’ll send you 5 boards free. Based on the delivery time, we’re guessing the boards will be manufactured in China and shipped by China Post.

It’s hard to find information about this offer, but you can see the details at their blog entry, “Get your PCBs professionally manufactured for FREE on Electronics-Lab.com”.