Author: Bob

We just added Osmond PCB to our list of free CAD software. It runs on the Mac and is free for designs with fewer than 700 pins. If you have experience with it, please write a short review of it.

Bay Area Circuits has a special deal for students: $30 for a single 2-layer printed circuit board up to 50 square inches. We’ve covered Bay Area Circuits for a while, but we didn’t include their Student service because there was no way to indicate that you needed to be a student to qualify. But now that we can display extra information about each manufacturer, we were able to include this service.

We’ll still report Bay Area Circuit’s non-student prices, and this leads to another new feature on the site: a manufacturer can appear more than once in the PCB price comparison results. So far, only Bay Area Circuits can appear twice – and only if you’re ordering a single 2-layer board less than 50 sq. in. – but maybe others will appear in the future.

PCBShopper has a great new feature! Many manufacturers offer different services with different prices. ExpressPCB, for example, has several services including Standard, Miniboard, MiniboardPro, ProtoPro, and more. Bay Area Circuits has Weekend Warrior, 2 Layer Special, Golden Gate, etc. Previously, we’d give you the best price from a manufacturer but we didn’t show you which service that price came from. You could go to the manufacturer’s web site and be unsure where to find the price we gave you.

We’ve solved that by adding extra information to the price comparison table. Now, if a manufacturer has multiple services, we tell you which service to use for the best price. It shows up in italics under the manufacturer’s name.

Now that we have the ability to display extra information for each manufacturer, the door is open for more useful features. If you have any ideas about what other info we can display, please contact us and let us know.

We have some sad news. We announced  last month that Sunstone, aka PCB123, had been added to PCBShopper. It worked for a while, then it broke. We don’t know if something broke on our side or their side. We had contacted them and were hoping for their assistance in troubleshooting it, so we held off on announcing the problem. But no help has come so far, and it’s been a couple of weeks, so here’s the announcement: Sunstone is not listed on PCBShopper.

It’s a big disappointment to us. Sunstone is an important American manufacturer. They may not be able to compete on price with the Chinese manufacturers, but many PCBShopper users care about more than just price. They wanted to see Sunstone listed on PCBShopper, and so did we.

We’ve added another Chinese manufacturer, ShenZhen2U, to PCBShopper’s PCB price calculator. ShenZhen2U came to my attention when they contacted us and asked to be included in the calculator. We hate to say no, so here they are.

We’ve added Bay Area Circuits to our price calculator. BAC also offers a free CAD program, PCB Creator, and we’ve added that to our CAD list.

We’ve added U&I, our first South Korean PCB manufacturer. You might better know them from their URL, quickturnpcb.co.kr.

The PCB manufacturer Sunstone Circuits, which is also the company behind the free PCB123 CAD software, is now included in our printed circuit board price calculator. We handle both their ValueProto and Full Feature services.

We’ve added a new, free CAD package called Upverter. It’s a web-based application and it’s normally paid for on a monthly basis. But if you make all your designs open-source (not  a problem for most hobbyists), access is free and it appears there are no crippled features. It looks intriguing. Has anyone tried tried it? If so, please write a review!

CY Industrial has been added to our universe of PCB manufacturers. Welcome!