Is there anybody else who needs a thin PCB for something? If we get enough orders together, could BatchPCB run a panel of something besides the standard-thickness FR4?
I have one project that requires a 32 mil thick board (a plug-in card for a Mattel Juicebox) and another where saving a few mils off the height would be helpful. Neither is worth the hundreds of dollars a full-custom would cost, though (each board is only a few square inches).
Any chance BatchPCB’s fabricator could do a small run of thin boards?
At some point I need to make a Mini-PCI-E card - those need to be 1mm thick. (That’s about 39-40 mil) I don’t know if that helps you with your batch run, since you needed the 32mil card…
Of course, I don’t see 39mil as an option on that GPX page at all… I guess I need to check the data sheet for my Mini PCI-E connector and see if there’s some leeway in what it’ll accept…
tetsujin:
At some point I need to make a Mini-PCI-E card - those need to be 1mm thick. (That’s about 39-40 mil) I don’t know if that helps you with your batch run, since you needed the 32mil card…
Of course, I don’t see 39mil as an option on that GPX page at all… I guess I need to check the data sheet for my Mini PCI-E connector and see if there’s some leeway in what it’ll accept…
Out of curiosity - what are you making a mini PCI-E card for?
tetsujin:
At some point I need to make a Mini-PCI-E card - those need to be 1mm thick.
Out of curiosity - what are you making a mini PCI-E card for?
I have a EEE and I want to add Firewire to it.
Of course, nobody makes a Firewire card as a mini PCI-E card (how would you connect peripherals to it?) so I got myself a Firewire Expresscard - I’m gonna saw off the bulky end with the connectors and hook the Expresscard end to the 3G slot. I’d rather not solder a bunch of wires to my main board, so I’d prefer to make a mini PCI Express card - so that if I ever want to undo the mod all I gotta do is unplug it and take the connectors off the inside of the case.
Of course, there’s all kinds of unknowns with this plan… Like will I be able to fit the altered firewire card inside the case, stacked on top of the 4mm PCI-E connector I’m installing for the 3G slot, and the 4G SSD? Does the EEE 901’s 3G slot even provide PCI-E signals? (I think it does, there’s board traces that go to the PCI-E pins) - and will the 901 BIOS do something nasty like disable the PCI-E signals going to the 3G slot before my OS has a chance to take over? I’m not really going to know if this will work until I try - another reason I’d rather not solder this mod to the main board.
There’s been some discussion on the EEE user forums as well about creating a mini PCI-e card to host USB peripherals - cut down on the “rat’s nest” effect from all those internally-mounted USB peripherals mounted with foam tape and wired to wherever you can get a USB signal. Since the 3G slot (and the SSD slots, for that matter) provide USB, a card would be a nice place to host a hub, maybe a peripheral or two, and some headers to hook up to other devices. 'Course it’s not worth it if it’s gonna cost $100 just to fabricate the board.
But, looking at the mini PCI-e pinout, I think there’s a fair chance I could have a regular-size board made and then file down the connector area to 1mm. Nearly all the important signals are on one side of the connector - it seems like the only thing I might possibly need that would be on the other side of the connector is SMBus - but I don’t think my Firewire card uses SMBus. (I’ll check, to make sure - but I could probably improvise a connection to the SMBus terminals if I had to.)
Read the initial post, and was wondering what you had planned for your Juicebox? I’m interested in putting together a programmable/bootable cartridge for the 2 boxes I have here. I have a design that uses a NAND device on the front, and a micro-SD card socket on the back. (It’s untested)
The issue I have (along with the thickness of the card), is that the tight tolerances of the NAND flash pads, violate the DRC spacing rules.
I second the opinion about getting GP to do it direcly for other board thicknesses. I ran some 0.039 thick (just what you need for SD pcb) boards there about a month back, with 7 mil spacing…the boards came out great! I was in same boat…would have sent to batchpcb but for the .039 thick boards. I still used the sparkfun DRC files, but made a slight change to allow for 7 mil track and pad spacing.
