Forgive my ignorance here - I've never set up a project that wasn't on a breadboard from Radioshack.
I'm wondering what the best way is to get my hands on multiple PCBs (maybe as many as 200) of a very simple design. I'd be mounting: 1 ATMega328, 1 Piezo buzzer, 2 tactile switches, 1 LED, 2 RF transmitters, and 2 CR 2032 holders all on a 4 inch x 4 inch PCB. And, obviously, the tracks to link them. So, that's a couple dozen holes and dozen or so tracks. I don't really care about solder masks or anything fancy like that at the moment.
So, what's the best way to get my hands on these PCBs? When I look at the 'design and order your own PCBs' websites, the prices seem to fluctuate dramatically from 5 dollars to 50 dollars a piece, and all of them seem to assume the boards will be more complicated than I need. But, DIY printing and etching my own seems like it would take a very long time. What has everyone else found to be the most efficient and inexpensive method?
simple, make your schematic in one of the programs available,
send the design off to a PCB fab facility,
wait for boards to come in.
if you can keep the board under 5cm x 5cm. you get a great price.
you can make multiple layouts or even multple boards on a 5cmx5cm, area for more savings.
Step 1: Design board in eagle or similar. Optimize for small board space, becasue fabs charge by board area. Your board is huge, and will cost a fortune - $80 for 3 OSH prototypes at 4x4". You can definitely make it smaller than that.
Step 2: Check and recheck design.
Step 3: Order 3 boards from OSH or your favorite prototyper, wait for them to arrive.
Step 4: Load and test prototypes. Make sure everything is just the way you want it. Make any needed corrections in the design...
Step 5: Send the design off to the fab house.
The details of step 5 depend a lot on how much of the work you're doing yourself and the specifics of your design.
Awesome guys, thanks. The more and more I've been reading, I've been coming to the conclusion that my 4x4 board is probably just too big That's the consequence of only ever using a breadboard!
I find myself wondering, though, how some of the cheap consumer electronics I buy (a talking stuffed animal or a small cheap handheld game) get away with selling their products for 5 to 10 dollars. Aren't their PCBs costing them 5 to 10 dollars just by themselves? Or are they doing something I don't know about (maybe making them in house, or ordering quantities in the millions)?
Take a look under 'Products and Services'. Several board manufacturers have introduced themselves in there, and you will also find personal preferences.
It seems to be showing me that you could get a PCB anywhere between 1 and 20 square inches for 3 bucks a piece as long as I order 100 square inches in total. That seems unrealistically cheap to me - is this legit?
If you scale production of a PCBA high enough, the cost per unit goes way down. The PCB fab process (for making the boards themselves) is very amenable to scaleup.
Even so, you'll notice that almost every board you find in service is about as small as they could get it