Anyone here tried one of the PCB assembly services?

[NeverDie]

I notice that JLPCB, allPCB, and probably others are offering discounts to try it out. I'm thinking of perhaps trying it to as a way to use some tiny QFN and similar chips that are otherwise difficult/frustrating for me to solder by hand. One could argue that this is, in essence, at least part of what the HopeRF modules amount to.

Anyone here tried it? Which vendors have the best prices/deals?

Ideally I might just make some castellated adapter PCB and perhaps just have a single hard-to-solder-by-hand chip soldered onto it. So, a service that charges by the chip, if there is such a thing, might be the best fit for me. I'm guessing it would be prohibitively expensive as a service for hobbyists, but in theory some kind of extreme industrial automation might drive the price down, maybe similar to the way that collectivist panelized PCB's have dropped the price for hobbyist PCB's.

[waspie]

i've had many PCBs done by JLPCB and they've all been top notch as far as I can tell.

I'm getting ready to make an integrated nrf24/atmega328 qfn board with them putting the components down soon so I can't answer how the part placement is but if it's like their PCBs it should be good.

[NeverDie]

@waspie Please do let us know how it goes. I'm very interested.

I put my first PCB order into JLPCB yesterday. According to their order tracking, it's has already finished production, and now they're just waiting for the carrier to pick it up. It was while placing that order that I noticed their assembly promotion...leading me to post this thread.

Is Seeed studio still partnered with mysensors for assembly? I clicked on one of the pre-assembled buttons for an item listed for sale on openhardware.io, but the link was dead:
https://www.openhardware.io/view/629/EFEKTA-TempandHum-sensorver-nRF52832-E-Ink-display

Seeed studio is currently offering free assembly for 5 PCBs. Sounds good to me. Anyone tried it? https://www.seeedstudio.com/free-assembly-for-5-pcbs.html

[TRS-80]

There are several much more talented people than me working on several different solutions to common problems and doing great work at miniaturization.

I have been dorking around for so long trying to put together basic things, that I will probably just wait for some of these other projects to come to fruition (and yes I know some have already).

That combined nrf + atmega328 in qfn is another such great idea. I'm a little shocked no one has done it already, honestly. Or maybe other existing implementations were not good? But that is exactly what we need.

Well that and the one integrated power supply (among others). That was a long thread but a great read. I learned a lot (still haven't finished it).

So like @NeverDie, I also look forward to hearing about what you come up with @waspie with great anticipation.

[waspie]

I've been sticking with atmega328p as I've tried nrf51 and 52 but i'm just not smart enough code-wise to get them to work reliably enough. the atmega on the other hand is very reliable and gives me almost no trouble.

[NeverDie]

@waspie Maybe you'll end up liking the Nano 33 BLE. It's built around the nRF52840, which is great news, because it means that--at least in t theory--the nRF52840 will become like a regular arduino. It also seems likely to be massively cloned, so prices should end up rock bottom eventually.

[Yveaux]

@neverdie said in Anyone here tried one of the PCB assembly services?:

Is Seeed studio still partnered with mysensors for assembly? I clicked on one of the pre-assembled buttons for an item listed for sale on openhardware.io, but the link was dead:
https://www.openhardware.io/view/629/EFEKTA-TempandHum-sensorver-nRF52832-E-Ink-display

This specific project chose to overrule the default parner link to order assembled PCBs by a specifc ebay-link, and that link died...

[waspie]

@neverdie thanks, i'll look into it and keep my eye on it.

[Danielo Rodríguez]

@trs-80 isn't there an arduino nano rf already? I saw some of those on aliexpress

[NeverDie]

@danielo-rodríguez If you mean this: https://forum.mysensors.org/topic/10327/rf-nano-nano-nrf24-for-just-3-50-on-aliexpress
its a different thing entirely.

Unfortunately, Arduino has completely overloaded the word "nano". At present there are at least 4 different types of official arduino nano's.

[Danielo Rodríguez]

Here is a review of this
https://youtu.be/55tgEMTumGo
Not sure why, it YouTube has started suggesting this kind of videos after I read this post