Mat has gone through the trouble of filling up a spreadsheet with the cost breakdown of Seeed’s PCB service. It seems that the boards with the lowest cost-to-area ratio are the 10cmx10cm ones that are ordered in quantities of 10. For higher quantities it quickly becomes apparent that the larger boards have a lower cost-to-area ratio.
Via the forum.
Seems odd to me to see such non-linearity in the pricing, although thinking about it..I guess the market demands will actually sway the pricing away from linear expectations. (ie 10×10 @ 10 pcs). They must be moving a high volume of those orders in order to get that price outlier.
Most of the boards I order from Seeed are in that 10×10 @ 10 pieces slot.
The outlier is most likely caused by the free version of EaglePCB having a limit of 10x8cm
Now if we can get a side-by-side comparison with iTead, and with color options it will be really useful, I found color boards to be cheaper at iTead, at least for some colors.
It’s not that easy to make a head-to-head comparison because the baseline services are different, namely the soldermask color options/assumptions and the e-test structure.
Technically this chart isn’t correct because Seeed only guarantees that 50% of the boards will be good (although my experience is that 90-95% percent are usable when only specifying 50% e-test).
there is no comparison in quality however. seeed is infinitely better
I thought that they used the same PCB house, at least at some point in the past.
Having had the same 5×5 board done at both Seeed and Itead, I couldn’t spot any significant difference other than iTead’s silkscreen was sharper than Seeed’s which was a tad fuzzy. (Of course iTead also includes 100% factory e-test for no extra charge which is why I decided to try them.)
Where can i produce 4 layers prototype ? Thx,
IteadStudio
SeeedStudio used to do 4-layer boards at the beginning, but they dropped that service a few years ago.
Itead still has 4-layer options in their iMall.
Yeah, sorry about that. The textbox ate my line break after “IteadStudio”, which was supposed to be the answer to the question, and the statement about Seeed separate.
Dorkbotpdx do 4 layer
10 pieces of 10×10 will fill up a 18″x24″ panel which is a common size for PCB factories. If you order the 10×10 there’s almost no work needed by them to start the panel
My guess is that this is not what’s going on. It was my understanding that Seeed/Itead’s gotten this great price by usng their orders to fill in incomplete panels that the PCB manufacturer is already running, and therefore utilized a resource that would otherwise be wasted. I will concede though that this doesn’t explain the (super) sweet spot for 10x10cm boards that doesn’t carry over to the other sizes.
@Hector, you’ve hit the sweet spot – proprietary dimension limitations of Eagle “free” and (idiotic) religious dedication to Eagle in the small scale prototyping community. Free us from Eagle – please1
Use KiCAD. IMHO better than Eagle for priciple of least surprise. FOSS, and no artificial limit sillyness.
Yes, free us from free, please!
Just because it’s the most usable by most objective measures doesn’t mean that we aren’t suffering under the tyranny of CadSoft! Oh, despair!
There’s always Design Spark which I believe is coming along. I don’t think it’s open source, but it’s free and I don’t think it has the restrictions of Eagle from memory. (Considering the liveliness of the Eagle Vs. Open Source debate, I know suggesting Design Spark is going to create a lot of ‘Sparks’).
Makes me feel slightly better about prototyping an Arduino shield which is 2.1″ x 2.7″ (53 x 68 mm).
Yeah, it’s really the best deal out there. Kudos to Seeed.
10×10 from Seeed costs $24.90 and the cheapest shipping becomes around $7
So, I just order two 10×10 from Seeed and add a cheap connector/anything to cart to make it cross $50 and free shipping. Isn’t that nice?