exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

My searches go back to pcbway overall... I will send them the files later and see what they come back with...

PCBWay seem to be a little overloaded at the moment.

I ordered some PCBs for an IKBD-to-RJ45 convertor board last week and instead of the 24 hour turnaround it took 72 hours, with about 8 hours to check the design initially rather than their quoted one hour.

Probably due to the Chinese new year when they had like three week vacation in February backed up a lot of jobs. Just guessing here...

There’s also a worldwide shortage of ICs, it’s all over the news. You have car makers and a lot of electronics companies scaling down production due to this shortage.
I can imagine JLCPCB my not be priority for chi foundries at th moment and it also can explain why their stocks are getting low.

Its a bit more complicated than that... LCSC have plenty of stock, but not in the warehouse jlc use...

I've been talking to JLC and there is hope they will buy them in as a custom order... I think it helps that I need over 400 of them... Otherwise they might not care so much..

There is one other company which (like others) are not going to be as cheap as JLC... BUT, they can do free issue parts, so things like the DAC could actually be done as well at factory. I think having more stuff done, would help offset the higher cost.

Also, they could assemble the sockets as well. I would only be using 3M sockets, but the assembly price I think isn't to bad, probably about £5 a board (excluding the cost of the sockets) ... Problem there is shipping costs will go up and taxes etc, so probably end up more like £10... IMHO £10 to assemble the sockets wouldn't be bad anyway.

I would think people are getting tired of builds lately, some cant build them full stop, so what do people think about just going for full assembly ?

Also this company offers x-ray and full test for about £3 more, (JLC are supposed to test, but with odd issues I have seen by people, they obviously dont) It may be worthwhile going for full test aswell.

I hate JLC so much right now :mad:

Hi Chris ,

Good day ~

Sorry ,we're afraid that our purchasing team won't purchase this part in advance due to the complex issues .

Would you like to check after a few weeks ？

Thanks ~

How I think this will pan out... is

1) JLC make the boards as before, But the GTL chips as a minimum would be missing from the build, and possibly other SMT chips. Then price would still be basically the same as before. But as the H5 addons are 3.3V, and the likelihood of people struggling to solder the chips, it kind of renders the expansion port little bit problematic if people cannot just simply plug stuff in :roll:

2) The only way to assemble a board otherwise, is to use a different manufacturer.. The problem is JLC are 2-3 times cheaper than most of the mainstream suppliers. The overall best deal I could probably get is double the price (£55 per H5 would end up being more like £100) . Obviously I don't really see this as a attractive option as the price has doubled for really nothing, but there is nothing I can do about this unfortunately.

3) In order for number 2 to be more attractive, it would be better to have a full assemble of the board ( mostly the PLCC & DIP SOCKETS) . even though the cost would be higher still, at least people would actually be getting something for the extra costs.

Problem is I can only do one of the options above.. I was going to put it to a vote, but I know what the outcome will be, that half the people would want a fully assembled board, and the other half would want a part assembled want to keep costs down.. But unfortunately I just cannot do both.

I think by the time I'd spent money on the BOM, sockets n stuff, paid postage for it from two different places (mouser and your store) it was probably close to £100 anyway. So personally I'd be happy fully assembled *especially* since some parts are difficult to solder due to the gold plating... tbh now I've experienced gold plating I'd vote against it if we had another choice.

Steve wrote: 09 Mar 2021 15:48 I think by the time I'd spent money on the BOM, sockets n stuff, paid postage for it from two different places (mouser and your store) it was probably close to £100 anyway. So personally I'd be happy fully assembled *especially* since some parts are difficult to solder due to the gold plating... tbh now I've experienced gold plating I'd vote against it if we had another choice.

Yeah, I don't know if its just the gold from JLC, but I agree it was worse than tin... but when ive had boards from OSH (which are gold) they have been great. New builds probably won't be gold as it costs more anyway.

Also agree on "multiple suppliers" of parts, I hadn't thought about that as a "end user cost". Stuff from my store has a "mark up price" on it, it has to , otherwise it would be pointless running my store, but on such full builds, it would be all "at cost" as the stuff would go from mouser direct to the fab house.