BigDumbDinosaur wrote:
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Beautifully fabricated, I don't know how they can build it at $1.60 per board.
I too wonder how they do it. I recall in the not-too-distant past when getting a prototype PCB made cost at least $500. These days, $500 can get you a whole pile of boards if you choose the right board house and your design isn't too big. I'm guessing the charges for hobby-quantity orders are little more than a break-even price that is readily absorbed by the orders for production quantities that are JLCPCB's bead and butter. The shipping charge for the POC V2.0 board with a template is nearly as much as what I'm being charged for the parts themselves.
I think it's just that they have so much volume and automation, so long as you choose common options they can squeeze your little 10cm square board onto a huge panel with hundreds of other orders and it costs them almost nothing. The guys with the bigger boards are paying the cost of taking the ppanel through the process. Given the pricing I imagine they still don't receive enough of these tiny board orders to use up all the wasted "offcuts" from larger boards.
You'll see that if you change the options that sometimes the cost jumps by an order of magnitude - that's what you get for not fitting on someone else's panel!
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Not me. The frugal (my wife says "cheap") Irishman in me compels me to repeatedly go over my layouts looking for anything that might be questionable. I try to get it as close to perfect as possible before I send in the Gerbers.
I'm like that too, I can't bring myself to order PCBs that I'm not sure about. However cheap they are, it feels wasteful, I'll just have to throw them away or use them as coasters or something like that. And as a hobbyist I also enjoy the process of obsessing over the design, doing the best job I'm capable of, even if it's costing me more time than that's worth.
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